Lukas Beeler's IT Blog

I’ve compared Hyper-V and ESXi in the past. Since then, the virtualization market has changed. I was also able to get more experience, and have two HP ML110 G5 that run ESXi (albeit unsupported) and Hyper-V Server.

I’ve ran a test environment, mostly to play with Citrix XenApp, SBS 2008 and EBS 2008. Especially the latter, as multi server solution, could be run with multiple roles distributed on Hyper-V and ESXi hosts, which made it interesting to deal with.

Hyper-V Server management

Well, i’ll be blunt. Hyper-V Server standalone management sucks. Big time. The problem here is that you need a Vista machine (which is a problem in the testlab which mostly consists of older PCs), and then you’ll need to create same-username same-password accounts to connect the two.

Also, if you just want to delegate specific VMs, you’ll need to dive into the depths of WMI.

Many of those problems vanish when you’re using a domain setup, with Hyper-V Server joined to the domain. But that’s usually not the case in a test lab.

Add to that that Server Core is still very young, and a lot of 3rd party hardware manufacturers do not have anything Server Core ready yet. Many don’t even announce whether certain tools are supported on Server Core or not.

This doesn’t mean Server Core is a bad idea – it just means that we will need to wait for hardware manufacturers to catch up – also management agents like Backup, Anti Virus, etc. will need to get up to speed for running on Server Core.

ESXi management

ESXi works very well with standalone management. You go to the website, download the VI Client, enter user and password, and you can manage the VM host – you can also delegate permissions easily.

From what i’ve read so far, using single signon and Active Directory with ESXi is more cumbersome than on Hyper-V server. Makes sense.

ESXi integrates a lot of hardware drivers and management. However, fewer servers are supported than with Hyper-V Server. On the other hand, you can use the native ESXi tools to create teams etc., something which you can’t on Server Core because the HW manufacturers do not ship the tools for Server Core.

My opinion

ESXi works very well in a standalone lab environment. Hyper-V is lackluster at best. What does that mean for you? If you want to build a test lab, go with hardware that supports ESXi, or if that is too expensive, go with hardware that at least works with ESXi.

HP recently had a special offering for an ML110 G5 hardware bundle, that consisted of the following parts:

• Intel Xeon 3065 2.33Ghz 4MB L2
• 512MB ECC RAM
• E200 SAS Controller (8 Ports, 128MB BBWC)
• 2x 160GB 7.2kRPM SATA Disks

For less than 400 CHF. As i needed a machine to run SBS2008 at home, and my current one wasn’t 64bit capable, this seemed like a good buy, especially because the E200 with BBWC alone is worth around 300 CHF.

Of course, i needed more RAM and disk space. I also ordered 4x 2GB memory modules (with ECC) from a third party memory manufacturer (Transcend) – priced at around 80 CHF each. I also ordered 4x Western Digital 1TB disks that are optimized for 24 hour use, priced at around 180 CHF.

This brought me to a total price of around 1500 CHF. I had two 160GB disks that i didn’t have any use for (except throwing them at people i don’t like).

1500 CHF is a lot of money for me, but for a company it’s nothing – still, this is ideal for experimentation. The free ESXi supports the E200 SAS controller, making it easy to build a test lab based on VMware – also, Windows Server 2008 x64 and Hyper-V also run flawlessly on the machine.

The machine is also very quiet, making it possible to use it in a normal appartment or in your office.

You get what you pay for still applies – the machine has no remote management features, only a single network port, forcing you to use the same port for management and virtual machine traffic, which can be acceptable in a test environment. HP’s System Insight Manager is not supported on this machine, either.

The case is very small, resembling a normal HP client minitower. The mainboard supports ECC memory, which is becoming more and more important with todays memory sizes. Unfortunately, it only offers four memory slots with a maximum capacity of 2GB per stick, maxing the machine out at only 8GB of RAM.

The integrated E200 SAS RAID Controller has a 128MB BBWC card, that allows it to use it as a write cache, and enables licensing to use RAID5. In my case, i used RAID10. The disk performance is better than anticipated, even though i’m using slow consumer drives, the performance for running VMs is acceptable.

The machine has three x8 PCI-E slots and a single PCI slot. One of the x8 slots is used by the E200 controller.

This offer is still available under HP Part# 470064-639, and there are still some companies that are selling it for the lower promotion price.

I’m currently running SBS2008 directly on the hardware, with not virtualization in-between. The performance is good, but i’d still never use such a setup for a production deployment at a customer – the management options, hardware flexibility, redundancy etc. just aren’t fit for production.

Update: I was asked about Linux compatibility on this machine. See the official HP Linux compatibility list. The E200 SAS RAID Controller is supported by the cciss driver, which is in the vanilla linux kernel. So most distributions will be able to install on this box – support is another matter, though.

There is no easy way to get official support for non-corporate versions of Linux, like Ubuntu. My usual way in those scenarios is to run Linux as a VM under ESXi, but that doesn’t work with the ML110 as ESXi is not supported (but works).