VM discussion

[silicon_toad2000]

Hey guys,

I wanted to start a thread to help me out a bit on something I'm looking at doing with my network.

I currently have a Freenas box which is on most of the time and a windows desktop which is also on all the time. The freenas needs rebuilding and I'm going to switch to NAS4Free.
I want to improve my hardware utilisation and run freenas and windows on the same box. I don't do anything on the wiodnows box but chat, email, surf and some text editing.
I'll looking at 2 different methods.
1) Installing nas4free (freebsd based os) on the box and running windows inside a VM with the nas4free as the host OS.
2) installing proxmox on the box and running nas4free and windows beside each other in seperate vms

The problem with 1 is that nas4free doesn't have a desktop environment so I will have to uinstall that before i can even get to installing virtualbox or other vm hardware to run windows in. Running proxmox seems to be a bit more complicated for such a simple setup, however proxmox allows for addition hardware nodes to be added to create a cluster down the track if thats what i want to do.

I know there's no right or wrong answer, just looking for peoples opinions.

[White Stripes]

is DLNA use part of this NAS box?

[White Stripes]

if you are going to give a NAS box a graphical environment why not just go with a standard linux or bsd distro and configure the NAS tools manually... install wine on that to run the windows apps that you have the windows box for...

but seriously.. if DLNA use is part of this equation leave the NAS box as a separate box...   

[silicon_toad2000]

I don't use DLNA at the moment.

I'd like to keep the windows environment seperate in case i screw something up and need to format/reinstal but they make a virtualbox for most systems so I could just manually configure a linux box, that'd be an interesting learning curve

[White Stripes]

if your NAS box is using samba already there wont be much of a curve to learn... samba is included in.. basically all linux distros that i know of... ...if RAID is involved there are fully graphical utilities for that now...

[Pri]

In my opinion the best way to do this would be to install Windows on the hardware and then run VMWare Workstation 10 (v11 comes out this December). Then run Nas4Free or Xpenology DSM as a guest OS. With VMWare Workstation you can dedicate disks to VM's so they will not be accessible under the Windows host, only the guest will have full complete access to the disks as if they were plugged in directly.

This gets you a responsive system with workable graphics (lots of things are becoming graphics accelerated now days including video content). And you'll get a VM which you can easily move around to other hardware in the future, migrate to ESXi on another system and you have the flexibility of moving the hard drives the VM uses to another physical system and booting straight off them due to VMWare Workstations disk passthrough features I mentioned above.

I'd only recommend using ESXi, Promox, KVM, HyperV Server or a similar bare metal hypervisor for servers. I wouldn't recommend that approach for a desktop system you're going to be sat at and using with a mouse keyboard and display. For that VMWare Workstation under Windows or Virtual Box under Linux is the way to go.

[White Stripes]

windows on hardware = random reboots for security updates.... unfortunately microsoft hasnt figured out how to drop updates in place....

[Pri]

There are packages available for Linux that can remove the need to reboot for major security updates that otherwise would require reboots. I concede that readily.

But I think he would probably prefer the bare metal performance of Windows over running it in a VM. Especially where graphics are concerned. All the bare metal hypervisors I'm aware of have really crap graphics acceleration and cannot support WDDM in windows or DXVA 1/2. Which are really important if you want to play back h.264 video. Another concern is just basic video on youtube. Even that runs crappy in bare metal hypervisors under Windows.

It's kinda funny actually, VMWare Workstation and Parallels Desktop are not bare metal hypervisors. They run under another host OS like Windows or Mac OS X and yet both of them offer higher graphical performance and compatibility than all these bare metal solutions that in some cases cost 10's of thousands of dollars.

That is to say Windows runs better under VMWare Workstation (with full video playback and even 3D support for latest DX10 games) than it does under Proxmox, ESXi, HyperV Server etc - It's kinda funny and annoying at the same time.

[White Stripes]

last time i tried to run something 3d under vmware workstation the whole of vmware crashed... so ive never tried to do it again... vmware is also -terrible- at dos... but we have dosbox for that...

--edit--

http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/disable-forced-restarts-windows-update/

this might be handy if windows is used on the metal and the NAS a virtual machine...  ....think im going to have to do this myself... damn windows reboots itself at the most inconvenient of times

[Pri]

Personally I have my update settings set to "Download, but let me choose when to install". I have it set that way on my desktop and my server and have done for years.

[silicon_toad2000]

hmm good point about the graphics, i do stream a fair bit on this box.
updates aren't an issue.
I'm setting up some virtualboxes to test some of this stuff out. I'll look at just running nas4free in the virtualbox and see how the performance goes.