What is your home virtualization setup? VM's you use?

[kvnhaas24]

Hey Everyone!

One thing that I have been learning a lot about lately is virtualization.  It is a great way to try new things and be able to refresh operating systems with basically a couple clicks of your mouse.  At home, I have built a virtualization server where I have created a lab environment in which I am able to learn operating systems, applications, etc..  This is definitely a cool thing and would like to know more about what the linustech community use for their virtual environments. 

 

How is your home virtualization lab setup?  And what kinds of VM's do you have running?  Also, what kind of hypervisor do you run? (Hyper-V, ESXI, XenServer)

 

Look forward on hearing your setups everyone!   Thanks

[megadarkwood]

Setup is in my signature 

[cjeffcoatjr]

VM's are for the weak. #DUALBOOT4LIFE

[cjeffcoatjr]

Setup is in my signature 

8150...

[megadarkwood]

8150...

Good enough for what it needs to do

[kvnhaas24]

VM's are for the weak. #DUALBOOT4LIFE

Dual Booting works yes, but things like exchange, sharepoint, and the like, makes having VM's in which you can just fool around with and destroy basically on demand is a pretty awesome thing.

[macpro622776]

VM's are for the weak. #DUALBOOT4LIFE

 

But you can't run two or more operating systems simultaneously can you?

[urworstnit3m3r]

I'm just using Virtual Box for a few Minecraft servers.

[brwainer]

I have quite a few systems going with VMs:

 

-HP DL380g5 running Server 2012 Datacenter Hyper-V with the following VMs:

+CentOS iRedMail mail server

+CentOS webmin control server

+CentOS MySQL server

+CentOS Bukkit MineCraft server

+CentOS Vanilla MineCraft Server

+CentOS torrent machine

+CentOS http(s) server

+CentOS nagios server

+XP SP3 (doesn't really run anything)

(all the CentOS installations above are comand-line only, the XP and the server itself are in GUI. Got the MS server OS through my school.)

 

-Lenovo Twist Windows 8.1 Pro with Hyper-V (nothing running on it right now) and VMWare Workstation running:

+3 Ubuntu VMs for my Internetworking class

+3 Ubuntu VMs for my Network Application Programming class

(the professors set up VMs for the students to use then distribute them to students, the VMWare workstation is part of tuition. The laptop isn't.)

 

-HP dv7 that isn't running anything right now, but is slated to run the following under Hyper-V for redundancy:
+CentOS MySQL server

+CentOS mail server

+CentOS http(s) server

 

I realize that I don't have to have all of these servers as seperate virtual machines, and that I'm dealing with a lot of overhead. This is partly an experiment in enterprise systems and scalability and partly because I can.

[Atlantisman]

I also have quite a few systems running -

 

2x servers running ESXI (I use to run XenServer, but ESXi seems to have better compatibility with random versions of linux, i also have exp with Hyper-V), 32gb of RAM each, both have a Xeon E3 CPU, one is a 1275 and the other is a 1240, i believe.

 

 

VMs:

 

CentOS Production Web

CentOS Development Web

CentOS Minecraft

CentOS Terraria

CentOS Torrent machine

CentOS Ventrilo

pfSense 1 (for main LAN and DMZ networks for my projects)

pfSense 2 (for my buddy's entirely separate development environment)

Server 2008 1 (for my main DC)

Server 2008 2 (for my buddy's development)

Backtrack (for testing)

Mint (for testing)

Server 2012 (for testing)

And finally, vCenter Server.

 

 

I have a bunch more capacity and many vlans and completely closed off networks running behind the scenes (my house alone as about 8 different subnets for various things).

[kvnhaas24]

Thank you brwainer and atlantisman for each of your responses.  Very cool systems, as I love finding out what others are working with.

[madcow]

I run 2x Gentoo KVM/storage nodes. I stuff more services into fewer VMs to save RAM for ZFS on Linux that also runs on each box. I probably should run separate storage and VM nodes but I prefer to run fewer physical systems at home.

 

Router VM:

- Routing for LAN-WAN

- BIND

- squid

- unifi

- freeradius

- ddclient

- icecast

- murmur

 

VPN VM:

- OpenVPN

- Routing for LAN-VPN

- BIND slave (queries through VPN)

- squid (for browsing through VPN)

- rtorrent (the obligatory)

 

These two VMs can migrate and run on either of the 2 host nodes.

 

..and the interesting bits:

 

Windows gaming VM:

This VM has dedicated access to the host graphics card via VGA passthrough. General hardware passthrough has been around for a while but VGA passthrough specifically is newish and starting to become more accessible. It still requires a few unofficial patches to get working but offers solid stability and performance under gaming load.

 

Linux desktop VM:

This is my everyday desktop machine for work/browsing/etc. Also has access to the host graphics card. Cannot be used simultaneously with the gaming VM as it needs dedicated access to the same graphics card.