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With a new year upon me and an aging 08 R2 hyperv cluster, I am thinking of switching over to vmware using one of our local IT vendors. In the meantime I am looking for a crash course to get somewhat up to speed and also into building a home lab for this. I have an i7 930 sitting around somewhere that could be the core of a build but I’m wondering if I should just go on craigslist and see what server are going for in my area. Any suggestions? My main desktop is an i7 5820 with 32 gb of ram but I use that for daily work and what not. Not sure if I can run vmware on hyperv but its worth a shot just to start.

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I’m running it on a Dell OptiPlex 960 for a home lab. Works fine for learning.

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You can run VMWare on Hyper-V. It’s called nested virtualisation.

I’m a huge VMWare fan but if you’ve got Hyper-V already setup, why go VMWare?

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Your i7-930 should be fine. I ran VMware ESXi 5.5 on a 920 and 950 until I upgraded to newer systems (i7-3930k).

I was running with Asus x58 Sabertooth MBs with 48GB of RAM

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Double check your network card is on the approved list. Many consumer boards use Realtek or similar network chipsets, many of which aren’t supported in ESXi. You may have to add on an Intel or similar PCIe board.

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Unless you just want to pay for features Hyper-V gives you for free, why switch to ESXi? Curiosity?

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You can’t run “Vmware” in Hyper-V, I assume you mean ESXi in this case. As Gary mentioned, you can do Hyper-V in ESXi

Also, VMware Workstation doesn’t work with the client version of Hyper-V in Win8 and 10.

edit: well, technically you can run ESXi, but with no hardware virtualization, which prevents 64Bit VMs which makes it pretty useless except as a proof of concept.

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Like the others here in this thread, I too advocate considering Hyper-V. It’s built in so no added expense (you do of course have to worry about licensing, but under VMware,the licensing costs would be higher - and you’d have to pay for VMware itself).

I assume you are not planning on using the bare (free) ESX hypervisor (or Hyper-V Server for that matter)?

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nothing wrong with the trusty lga 1366, cheap servers dual 6c/HT for 24core. :slight_smile:

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Can’t comment on going vmware, that’s probably something you know better. About “vmware on hyperv” sure you can do that! That’s called “nested virtualization” and is fully supported (and greatly improved in WS2016).

Run Hyper-V in a Virtual Machine with Nested Virtualization

Install a VMWare ESXi 6.0 Hypervisor in a Hyper-V VM

Going nested is a VERY good start actually.

Good luck!

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If you want to learn about VMware before investing in a home lab, there are live sandbox environments you can use on-demand:
https://www.vmwarelearningplatform.com/HOL/

“Hands on Labs”

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Once you get to the home-lab-investment stage, check out William Lam’s posts about using a NUC .

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From my experience, setting up nested Hyper-V on ESXi is much less painful than vice versa. Nevertheless, nested ESXi is still doable with some efforts (KOOLER has already provided a couple of useful links). You can also use StarWind VSAN Free for presenting shared storage to your nested ESXi hosts if you decide to go this way eventually: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free

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I’m confused. Why would the licensing costs be higher, assuming you’re not speaking of licensing VMware?

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Keep in mind that Hyper-V doesn’t pass through hardware virtualization to ESXi and and as a result you’re stuck with 32bit VMs only. Hardware virtualization is required for 64bit VMs. This puts a big limit on what you can virtualize in a nested ESXi server.

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The move to ESXi is in being lead by the “recommendations” of a local MSP. I’m not necessarily opposed to it because it gives me a chance to grow my skill set and learn more about the other side of the pond. With that being said I’m one test away from my MCSA in Server 2012 so if the pricing is not what is expected server 16 would be a pretty simple turn around to get in place.

I think I will look into a NUC that might be the most cost effective at the moment building an entire machine even an X58 could start to get expensive especially since I get the hardware bug and go crazy sometime.

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What you could also do is just install VMware Workstation on your host, and run ESXi 6 as a VM. Ideally, add an SSD for the VM to run on and bump your RAM to 64GB and you’re good to go. Workstation will run nested ESXi and pass through the hardware virtualization.

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Hey OP- I apologize for my late response! If you’re still looking for a server, make sure you check out the HPE SMB Marketplace. It’s designed specifically to help you compare and contrast HPE products and services based on your own specific requirements, like price, capacity, etc.

It may be worth checking out! HPE Store US

Hope this helps some!

@HPE