Hyper-V All-in-One (Firewall, Router, ZFS, napp-it Web) - Under 60w

[MiniKnight]

How is the CPU airflow in that configuration? Looks like the fan is offset from the heatsink.

 

[mrkrad]

How does this compare say with westmere on power? I had a DL360 G6 with 4 out of 8 SSD, LSI 9260-8i, 2x10gbe SFP+ nic's, 72gb of ram, L5630 -> it pushes backups using veeam at 9gbps pegging the cpu out at around 100-110 watts! Amazing for such and old technology hp box!

 

[Patrick]

I have been having some fun with WP today but that is pretty good. The L5630 is a great chip. 40w TDP IIRC?

The Rangeley platform with a 10GbE dual SFP+ NIC and 4x SSDs will run in the 40w total system power range.

 

[Arrogant]

So I am completely jacking your idea, and installing basically this same setup on my new box. The only difference I am going to make is no pfsense, and no centos.

 

[cactus]

Is Hyper-V server free? If so, when did I miss that?

 

[PigLover]

There has been a free Hyper-v server product since the introduction of 'server core', shortly after the release of MS Server 2008.

 

[MiniKnight]

There has been a free Hyper-v server product since the introduction of 'server core', shortly after the release of MS Server 2008.

I would say though that Hyper-V Server (original) versus what we have today in Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 is very different. Microsoft has added many new features and Hyper-v Linux support just sucked in 2009 while now it is really good.

cactus - sounds like you haven't tried. Best part is you can use Win 8.1 to manage using Hyper-V manager + RSAT.

 

[PigLover]

Agreed. Until recently hyper-v was pretty much limited to running MS based VMs. With release of the Linux Integration Services it got better, but only for SLES/RHEL. Within the last year or so the integration tools have been mainlined into the kernel and almost any recent Linux distro is well supported

BSD ports of the Integration Services are starting to show some maturity too - meaning support for things like pfsense becomes reasonable.

Finally, 2008- based hyper-v server was almost unusable unless part of an active directory domain and using iscsi storage. This was largely fixed in MS2012 and 2012/R2.

It is now quite usable.

 

[MiniKnight]

I totally agree PigLover. If you don't want to run Solaris and FreeBSD Hyper-V is all you need. The mainline kernel in Linux makes it way easier to use but also, IMHO, makes me feel more trusting of Hyper-V in terms of stability.

Hyper-V sucked when every VM was basically required to have a MS license of some sort. Now not an issue and Microsoft actually encourages the use of the free version to lower security threats.

 

[Chuckleb]

I though read somewhere that you have to run pro versions of Microsoft operating system guests? I have a few VMs that I'd rather run XP or other licenses for, do they work?

 

[capn_pineapple]

Perhaps I suck at reading, or I have no idea about virtualisation (just starting with it), but with the VM running ZFS, noting that neither rangeley/avaton have VT-D, how would one go about passing the HDDs through? For example, I was thinking of grabbing one of these, running a ZFS VM (4 disks), pfsense vm, and a general linux vm for HTPC duties. Is it just a matter of assigning the HDD's to the VM from the hypervisor? or is BMA from VT-d required?

I'd be playing around with some VM's properly, but I'm in the middle of moving house so the PC isn't running yet.

 

[Patrick]

VT-d is used to pass entire devices through (e.g. NICs, HBAs or RAID controllers.) With Hyper-V you cannot really do this so instead you click a few buttons in the UI and pass the individual disks through.

 

[capn_pineapple]

I think that has sold me on this platform. with a decent amount of ram, using an HBA to a jbod chassis could provide a storage expansion path as well, or if required a second one purely as a storage machine with no VM's. With the low power envelope it makes sense.