ESXi or Hyper-V?? or maybe something else

[alizee]

I'm kind of at a loss right now figuring out which I want to run at home. I've been playing around (a lot) with ESXi on a test machine, and I like it a lot. The issue is that my hard drive controllers are not compatible (RocketRAID 2720). I started another thread asking about HBAs, and I'm not planning on using RAID. Those controllers are compatible with Windows, and I assume would be compatible with Hyper-V, which leads me to think I may want to use it.

VMs that I'm planning on:
pfsense router (I have the NICs for it already)
FreeNAS, Nexenta, or Illumos NAS
Windows Home Server 2011
Others to play with (Linux, Windows, etc.)

I don't know the big advantages for Hyper-V, but it seems like non-Windows guest support is not really there.

Any other ideas on a Hypervisor? Xen and KVM appear to have less than stellar Windows support, but I could be wrong (I've only briefly looked at them).

Thanks in advance!

 

[Paperlantern]

I would just use ESXi, it is what I use to run my Minecraft server (CentOS 5.8) and I love it. I tried hyperv and you are right, the non ms support is Luke warm at best, whereas VMware just rocks it. I also cannot use RAID because of a unsupported controller on my DL320 g5 but I just use two drives and make sure I back up often. Another upside is you can install ESX to a thumb stick and use more controllers for larger storage. It is incredibly stable on my hardware(and an hardware I've ever used it on), and gives you a lot of control. Plus heck, it's free as long as you have a single CPU. Hands down best choice.

 

[theevilsharpie]

Hyper-V is okay with modern Linux kernels because of the work MS has done on integrating the Hyper-V paravirtualization components into the kernel, but the BSDs have been largely ignored. Also, Hyper-V management sucks if you aren't in the same domain, which will be likely if it's a domain machine. My experience is based on Hyper-V on 2008 and 2008 R2, so Hyper-V in Server 2012 may be better.

I'll second the recommendation for ESXi. VMware OS's support is in a league of its own.

 

[zeekr]

I'm no virtualization exppert but I had a similar experience to threevilsharpie with Hyper-V.

I recently put together a small virtualization server at home for testing. ESXi wasn't even on my mind because I was planning on using Hyper-V Server 2008 R2. As soon as I tried setting up a Hyper-V server I realized that in non-domain (workgroup) type environment, which is what I have at home, it's not very practical to run a Hyper-V. It seemed like Hyper-V is much happier when it's part of an existing domain and being managed from that existing domain.

ESXi wins in this department. You just install it and manage it from any machine on the same network.

 

[alizee]

I think I agree about ESXi. I downloaded HyperV to play with, and I'll see how I like it, but it will have to do a lot to sway me. I just hope I can find a decent HD controller that works natively.

 

[quikah]

For simple setup like yours I could do either, but don't use server core if you use Hyper-V, it is pretty stupid process to get remote management working correctly. Some of the steps to get things working in general are very convoluted compare to ESX. I am trying to get a cluster setup now on hyper-v, looks like it is going to be a day or 2 affair to figure this mess out. it took me all of 5 minute to setup the cluster on Vmware.