Windows Various ESXi questions including running an Active Directory Domain Controller

I know I am probably going to be moaned at for this, but why not use windows hyper-v 2012?

 

I'd like to turn that question around and ask you to explain why you should use HyperV at all?

 

I don't know how Hyper-V stands from a technical perspective, but I'm trying to stay away from Microsoft as much as possible. I like free and open software, and "free" here is as in "free speech", not "free beer" (as Richard Stallman puts it so well). I know, ESXi is not exactly free according to this definition, but still, VMware is (still) far from Microsoft on the evilness scale.
I mean no disrespect for you deathtaker27 and appreciate your input on this subject. I'm sure Hyper-V has evolved over the years and maybe some things are easier done compared to VSphere. I'm holding it as a last option if VMware and KVM prove not to be on my liking.

 

Thank you for a well thought out reply, Just to clarify I wasn't aiming to troll, I was just curious to see what the reasoning behind this was.
On the free argument, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 is a Non-Gui Free hyper-v server that you can install and run in production enviroments.

@CraigWatson
In argument to why you should use hyper-v I would type it out, but I think the following is one of the best round ups I have read of recent times:

http://garvis.ca/2012/07/05/a-respo...e-comparing-vsphere-to-hyper-v-system-center/

 

Is there a procedure/utility for that?
I tried it on the new ESXi 5.1. I had a VM created on an iSCSI NAS. I installed a hypervisor on another machine, connected to the iSCSI datastore, but could only run that VM if I created a new one and specified the existing files on the NAS as it's virtual hard drive. Is there a better way to import an existing VM without going through the creation menus?

 

Do you know of any licensing limitations of Hyper-V, such as mandatory use of at least one Windows VM, or anything similar?

 

I'm not particularly interested in business reasons to go with HyperV, I'm more interested in performance benchmarking and operational reasons.

• Do VMs (especially Linux VMs, given that HyperV no doubt has some Windows-specific performance perks) perform better under HyperV?
• Does it give you more flexibility with virtual hardware?
• Can you hot-add disks/NICs/other hardware and hot-expand virtual disks?
• Can you run full paravirtualised hardware (so VMs on the same host can talk to eachother via full 10Gb networking rather than 1Gb LAN)

Assuming the VMX file is on the same datastore as the VMDK, you should be able to browse to the datastore and either double- or right-click on the VMX file - vSphere Client should ask you if you want to add the VM

Screenshot below from my host:

There's no license limitations AFAIK

 

Interesting read.
I remained with the impression that the main argument for using Hyper-V is it's significantly lower price. I have no doubt that if someone were to calculate the budget necessary to virtualize a proper datacenter, using Hyper-V would be a lot cheaper (for now ) than using VSphere. However, that's not my case. I'm going to start off with one host, and use a free hypervisor for that single host. The price of the advanced features is not an issue for me at the moment.

 

Darn it, could it be that simple? How did I miss that?

 

I've just read the article fully, and I'm going to stick my neck out and call marketing BS. It's basically just a Microsoft sales rep trying to take apart VMware's "we're better than Microsoft" sales pitch, which doesn't really help anyone.

Ultimately it's up to Microsoft to provide sound technical reasons why HyperV is a good choice over vSphere (or even Linux-based solutions like KVM/Libvirt/QEMU or Xen). If there's no real operational benefits from going with HyperV, I'd personally either stick with vSphere or even look at Linux KVM if you're confident with your Linux knowledge.

Other thoughts on hypervisors are in my post here.

 

Aaaaand here's another question:
Have you "bonded" NICs with ESXi? Any quirks that I should know about?

 

Bonded (or "Teamed") NICs work absolutely great in ESXi - you can either active/passive or load-balanced teaming

 

Can you give me more detail? I'm not sure what you mean by active and passive teaming?

 

Active/passive means that one NIC will be in-use while the other will be the secondary NIC and will only be used when the active NIC fails.

Load-balanced does exactly what it says on the tin, both NICs are active with the load balanced equally between the two.

More detail: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1004088

NIC teaming needs 802.3ad support on the connected switches, but this is (I think) built into the Gigabit Ethernet standard so you should be fine

 

802.3ad ? That's LACP, isn't it?

 

Yep, LACP is Link Aggregation Control Protocol (wiki) -

 

Over other forms of NIC bonding, LACP is the most advanced and recommended, isn't it?

 

As far as I know it's the only bonding technology - an IEEE standard is generally worth using

 

From Wikipedia:

"... most network switch manufacturers had included aggregation capability as a proprietary extension to increase bandwidth between their switches. But each manufacturer developed its own method, which led to compatibility problems."

"In addition to the IEEE link aggregation substandards, there are a number of proprietary aggregation schemes including Cisco's EtherChannel and Port Aggregation Protocol, Nortel's Multi-link trunking, Split Multi-Link Trunking, Routed Split Multi-Link Trunking and Distributed Split Multi-Link Trunking, ZTE's "Smartgroup", or Huawei's "EtherTrunk"."

 

You learn something new every day, +rep