RE: VMWare - Call me thick

["Neil Wrightson" <neilw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Simon,

Thanks for the response. I will have a look at the server version.


If anybody has VMWare and WHS experience, please chime in.


Regards,

Neil Wrightson.



_____

From: ukha_d@xxxxxxx [mailto:ukha_d@xxxxxxx] On Behalf Of
Simon Haslam
Sent: Monday, 5 July 2010 8:11 PM
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [ukha_d] VMWare - Call me thick




VMware provides an abstraction layer above the hardware - your VM doesn't
see the physical disk or devices themselves but a special VMware version.
Normally the disks made available to the guest VM would be carved out of
the
underlying drives, though it is possible to pass through raw disk devices
which I suppose is what you'd have to do to get WHS to then do the disk
management (I don't know how well that would work - you'd need to do some
careful testing).

Serial/USB devices: you can pass through USB devices to a VM with the
desktop products (not vSphere/ESXi) and presumably serial ports too.

There's also a tool which allows you to take a running physical host and
convert it to a VM image which can be quite handy.

I don't know if you'll get any Windows activation/licensing issues.

VMware products:
I think your best starting point is to use the free VMware Server
(http://www.vmware.com/products/server/)
which runs inside the OS already
installed on the host machine.

If your servers aren't heavily utilised I can see benefits from using
VMware
for both power saving and disaster recovery, however you may find you have
to put a reasonable amount of work in to become familiar enough with it. I
suggest you try out VMware Server on a spare PC first to see how you find
it.

Simon

--- On Mon, 5/7/10, Neil Wrightson <neilw@xxxxxxx
<mailto:neilw%40nwe.net.au> >
wrote:

From: Neil Wrightson <neilw@xxxxxxx <mailto:neilw%40nwe.net.au> >
Subject: [ukha_d] VMWare - Call me thick
To: ukha_d@xxxxxxx <mailto:ukha_d%40yahoogroups.com>
Date: Monday, 5 July, 2010, 10:50



Hi All,

I read with great interest "Martyn Wendon's Four Nodes"

In here he mentions VMWare (which I've heard of before) and was thinking

this would be something I would like to implement.

My HA system as it stands has two PC's. A WHS (19" 2RU Box) and a XP
(19"

4RU Box) with Misterhouse, xAP, xPL on it.

I'm looking at reducing this back to a single PC, probably the (19"
4RU

Box).

They both have Digi 8 Port serial cards for the various HA interface bit's

and pieces.

I also have another 8 port Geovision (19" 4RU Box) that is not doing

anything.

My understanding of the VMWare, is that I can create many virtual machines

that can reside inside the one box.

These images, once setup, can be transferred between PC box's. So if the
4RU

box died, they could be transferred to the 2RU box etc.

So without having to re-create the WHS box, I can make an image as it
stands

and transfer it to the other box as a virtual machine?

If WHS works with VMWare, how does WHS & VMWare handle the way WHS
utilizes

the many hard disks into a single volume?

Does the WHS backups of client PC's still work?

Now for the thick part.

I'm looking on the VMWare website and it just isn't clear to me, what I
need

to download (and possibly buy).

Regards,

Neil Wrightson.

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