Taking the ESXi --> Hyper-V plunge...few questions

[JimPhreak]

Trading vSphere for Hyper-V...EWWWW

hahah j/k i guess it's ESXi (free edition) for Hyper-V, man if you had all the goodies (lic access) of vSphere I don't think you'd ever look back!

I have an ESXi 5.5 Standard license but can't afford to pay for a new one for 6 right now. What features am I missing out on?

Have patience grasshoppa'...either VMware or someone in the virt community WILL patch/provide a vib for those 10G nics on the Intel Xeon D-1540 based systems w/ 10G option...just a matter of time.

You don't think they are excited abt this platform as well for SMB? :-D

I know it will eventually happen but it's pretty hard for me to wait when my VM box is also my firewall/router and I need the interfaces.

 

[whitey]

Proxmox is a KVM based distro right? Does it have good driver support? That's my big issue with ESXi right now since my motherboard is so new.

Guys I am not trying to be a turd burgler or anything and YES I am a VMware zealot (but take it from a man who came into virtualization from LPARS/Xen/openvz (proxmox has this container tech and KVM for full virt), and KVM)...I danced the open source Virt gammat and once I crossed over into the Enterprise space and saw the mgmt and extremely forward thinking ideas and brilliance coming out of Vmware eng I was astonished and somewhat saddened that the open source community could not keep pace...then again VMware had a good 6-8 yr jump/headstart on everyone in x86-land when it came to virtualization.

Long story short and getting back to my point...if you're waiting on drivers for new HW I can almost assure you 95% of the time Vmware will beat OS, open source, and other vendors to the punch so again just have a lil' patience I would not be one bit surprised if I start to hear chatter about 10G support for this platform start coming out of the Vmware/virt community woodwork.

Ohh btw, very curious, you said 10G works in Win2008 or 2012 (I forget which, doesn't matter to me), does that same adapter show up as a usable adapter to pin vSwitch (if that is what Hyper-V even calls it, prolly so) traffic to? Would be a bummer if at OS Win level it worked but Hyper-V it didn't...can't imagine why but would never put it past M$. :-D

 

[whitey]

I have an ESXi 5.5 Standard license but can't afford to pay for a new one for 6 right now. What features am I missing out on?




I know it will eventually happen but it's pretty hard for me to wait when my VM box is also my firewall/router and I need the interfaces.

Yeah that's what kills me abt that D-1540 platform currently. No HBA on the mobo and one PCI-E slot...likely for a HBA since it's missing from mobo...I want new SKU's w/ HBA's included! NOW! hah Hard to tell ya chew up that slot w/ a quad port nic when I KNOW you have that M1015 in there for unraid.

What would be wicked sweet is if VMware could pull their head out...'somehow' failback to a igb driver for those 10G nics of yours and at least run them at 1G for ya until they get the 10G nic adapter driver sorted out.

Tell ya what, remind me again what varient of Intel X520/540 adapter those detected as and I'll go hunt or post in Vmware networking and kernel communities for ya/us.

 

[JimPhreak]

Guys I am not trying to be a turd burgler or anything and YES I am a VMware zealot (but take it from a man who came into virtualization from LPARS/Xen/openvz (proxmox has this container tech and KVM for full virt), and KVM)...I danced the open source Virt gammat and once I crossed over into the Enterprise space and saw the mgmt and extremely forward thinking ideas and brilliance coming out of Vmware eng I was astonished and somewhat saddened that the open source community could not keep pace...then again VMware had a good 6-8 yr jump/headstart on everyone in x86-land when it came to virtualization.

Long story short and getting back to my point...if you're waiting on drivers for new HW I can almost assure you 95% of the time Vmware will beat OS, open source, and other vendors to the punch so again just have a lil' patience I would not be one bit surprised if I start to hear chatter about 10G support for this platform start coming out of the Vmware/virt community woodwork.

Ohh btw, very curious, you said 10G works in Win2008 or 2012 (I forget which, doesn't matter to me), does that same adapter show up as a usable adapter to pin vSwitch (if that is what Hyper-V even calls it, prolly so) traffic to? Would be a bummer if at OS Win level it worked but Hyper-V it didn't...can't imagine why but would never put it past M$. :-D

Yes they are available to be assigned to vSwitches in Hyper-V 2012 R2.

And just to make things clear, I haven't jumped ship to Hyper-V yet. I'm in the testing phase to see what works best for my hardware at present time.

 

[TuxDude]

I have an ESXi 5.5 Standard license but can't afford to pay for a new one for 6 right now. What features am I missing out on?

You probably won't notice any difference between 5.5 and 6 in that scenario. It's when you stick a vCenter in front of ESXi that you start to get access to more features. And a vCenter managing a collection of ESXi hosts that have shared storage really unlocks all the potential of the software.

But even having all that at work (around 30 dual-socket hosts, quite a few hundred VMs, FC SAN, VMware Enterprise Plus license) there isn't a huge push to upgrade to 6. In fact, we're also doing the research/evals to decide if HyperV is "good enough" to replace it - its obviously not as good, but is close, possibly provides all the features we need, and is effectively free since we're already buying Windows Datacenter licenses to cover the guest OSs.

 

[JimPhreak]

Yeah that's what kills me abt that D-1540 platform currently. No HBA on the mobo and one PCI-E slot...likely for a HBA since it's missing from mobo...I want new SKU's w/ HBA's included! NOW! hah Hard to tell ya chew up that slot w/ a quad port nic when I KNOW you have that M1015 in there for unraid.

What would be wicked sweet is if VMware could pull their head out...'somehow' failback to a igb driver for those 10G nics of yours and at least run them at 1G for ya until they get the 10G nic adapter driver sorted out.

Tell ya what, remind me again what varient of Intel X520/540 adapter those detected as and I'll go hunt or post in Vmware networking and kernel communities for ya/us.

 

[whitey]

Posed question to VMware communities. Awaiting feedback.

 

[JimPhreak]

Well I guess the "rumors" were right about not being able to make USB flash drives bootable for Hyper-V guests. That pretty much eliminates Hyper-V as an option for me.

 

[JimPhreak]

Posed question to VMware communities. Awaiting feedback.

Yea I had posted on the VMware communities a little over a week ago. The only response I got was "wait for a large vendor to chime in on this."