Virtual Lab Recommendations

[lunos]

Hi Guys,

I’m planning on building a PC which is initially intended for gaming but I also think with the specs I’m going for I should be able to host a few VM’s on the PC and rune a mini network.

I’m planning on going for at least a 4790k with 32GB RAM and I was wondering what Server ISO/Configuration you guys would recommend so I could built a home Virtual Lab/Network to learn things such as AD and Powershell etc.

[techelp]

Doing it properly, I’d use VMware but in small setups (like what you want) I like to use VirtualBox

You don’t need that much set aside for a small setup. It would have you sorted if you wanted a number of servers running at once. I have a smaller system and get by just fine. To save myself some memory, I’ll turn off servers not being used to allow the resources to be used by different servers. However it sounds like you have a good system if you want to run all of your servers you’d test with together.

[lunos]

I plan mostly to learn how to break things to then fix them so I think as everything will be virtual and I will keep images everything will be fine.

Thanks for the reply I really appreciate it

[techelp]

No problem, I’ve found snapshots to be pretty helpful if you need to step your way through a process. For instance, at the moment I’m deploying 13 new domains and needed to sysprep each of the servers on my template setup. I snapshot before each so I don’t run out of rearm and then have to reinstall everything after testing goes wrong or I go about something another way.

[jonathankillingsworth (jon_k_2010)]

I like Windows 8.1 or 10 Pro Hyper V myself. I use Hyper V on my 8.1 Pro laptop and it works amazing. Especially since I added a SSD to it. SSD will be my main thing you will want unless you have a RAID card. I just purchased a HP Z220 for $200 on Ebay with an i5 and 4 GB RAM. It is upgradeable to 32 GB RAM and has RAID in it. If you wanted to RAID a few drives (or even better SSD’s) then you would have a beast.

[mattware]

You could run Windows in a virtual machine and pass your graphics card through to it for gaming. That way you could bump up the resources for windows when you want to game, but drop them back when you don’t need them or want to play with other VMs.

[lunos]

or just have two keyboards, two mice and two monitors and on a separate VM have that use some of the gaming resources and essentially get two gaming PC’s for the price of one?

@mattware

You could run Windows in a virtual machine and pass your graphics card through to it for gaming. That way you could bump up the resources for windows when you want to game, but drop them back when you don’t need them or want to play with other VMs.

[essjae]

@lunos

or just have two keyboards, two mice and two monitors and on a separate VM have that use some of the gaming resources and essentially get two gaming PC’s for the price of one?

@mattware

You could run Windows in a virtual machine and pass your graphics card through to it for gaming. That way you could bump up the resources for windows when you want to game, but drop them back when you don’t need them or want to play with other VMs.

That’s not really how virtualization works. There are some tools that allow this, but none of the major virtualization platforms do this.

[essjae]

@mattware

You could run Windows in a virtual machine and pass your graphics card through to it for gaming. That way you could bump up the resources for windows when you want to game, but drop them back when you don’t need them or want to play with other VMs.

Video pass through does work, but you’re still going to see a performance hit.

If you want to place the latest AAA games at high resolution, this isn’t going to be a good solution. High-end gaming and virtual machines aren’t a happy combo yet. The one exception could be Xen with it’s passthrough of the host hardware to the primary VM.

[lunos]

thinking more towards CS GO as opposed to triple A titles

@smjain

@mattware

You could run Windows in a virtual machine and pass your graphics card through to it for gaming. That way you could bump up the resources for windows when you want to game, but drop them back when you don’t need them or want to play with other VMs.

Video pass through does work, but you’re still going to see a performance hit.

If you want to place the latest AAA games at high resolution, this isn’t going to be a good solution. High-end gaming and virtual machines aren’t a happy combo yet. The one exception could be Xen with it’s passthrough of the host hardware to the primary VM.

[scifijunkie]

I picked up a dell workstation T7500 off ebay a year or so ago for about $650US. With dual Hex Xeon 2.66 cpus, 24 gig of ram, upgrade-able to 192gb. I added a few SATA drives and off I go. Its quiet once posted and sits next to my home office desk and I don’t know its there.

On it I run Hyper-V, one big difference, at least as of my last use of VMware is memory allotment. With Hyper-V you can use dynamic ram and have it adjust the memory use of a running VM with out performance hit for the most part. I have have more than 16 system running in VM with this rig, something like 6 Servers and 10 clients, and while no real load was placed on any one system I could really get stuff tested with that setup.

You can get Hyper-V 2012 R2 standalone for free from MS and then get the ISOs for them for each of the test OSs you are building. IF you are build test version of windows 8 or 10 you will have to get the Test Install keys from MS as well so you can get past the install phase.

When looking for a Hypervisor its best to know the type that you will be going to support in the future, if you can. Then get that one and learn it while learning the other bits. Kill 2 birds with one stone. While they all work sort of the same there are big differences. I know that now you can, with work, build a VMware host and install Hyper-V over it and then run VMs under Hyper-V. Not sure hows it done but have read a paper on doing it.