VMWare Server.

[WebPlayz]

Howdy,

 

I have a workstation that I built and its been running fine but I want to load VMWare on it so I can bring a laptop with me that isnt the most powerful thing and just remote in whenever I need to use it, Problem is I don't know if I can even do this with the hardware I have right now. If anyone knows Please let me know!

 

CPU : I9-9900K

Mobo: Asus Prime Z390-a ( ive had issues so if i need a different motherboard I am more than willing to )

Ram : 32GB Corsair LPX DDR4

GPU: Amd RX560 ( Just so I could get more outputs )

PSU: Some antec 550W I had 

Storage: I got a couple NVME SSD's in it currently is it able to be used in VMWare?

 

Thanks in advance 

[Electronics Wizardy]

what do you mean by install vmware? What product from them?

 

You don't need vms to remote in, there are many remote desktop softwares you can use.

[WebPlayz]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

what do you mean by install vmware? What product from them?

 

 

VMWare 6.0 or 6.5 So the computer can run multiple VM at once then have a Intel nuc as a client side. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, WebPlayz said:

VMWare 6.0 or 6.5 So the computer can run multiple VM at once then have a Intel nuc as a client side. 

So you mean esxi?

 

Do you need vmware? There are lots of other hypervisors that many works better, including hyper-v thats built into windows.

 

 

[WebPlayz]

1 minute ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

So you mean esxi?

 

Do you need vmware? There are lots of other hypervisors that many works better, including hyper-v thats built into windows.

 

 

VMware is the first thing that comes to mind for me, If you know of a way that's better that allows multiple VM's at the same time let me know and I will look into them. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Just now, WebPlayz said:

VMware is the first thing that comes to mind for me, If you know of a way that's better that allows multiple VM's at the same time let me know and I will look into them. 

basically every hypervisor wll do this.

 

So you basically want the thin clients to connect over something like rdp?

 

Do you care about graphical performance? Thats gonna be a pain.

 

Id just try to get a faster laptop, doing vdi like this is normally expensive and not a great experience.

[WebPlayz]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

basically every hypervisor wll do this.

 

So you basically want the thin clients to connect over something like rdp?

 

Do you care about graphical performance? Thats gonna be a pain.

 

Id just try to get a faster laptop, doing vdi like this is normally expensive and not a great experience.

Not graphical performance, this is for my father and I had built this workstation for him a year ago and he wants to have mutliple connections into one machine with different vm's for each connection. Graphical performance is not the main goal, I had suggested a faster laptop but he needs the battery life and cannot find a balance between performance and battery life. So just clients connecting to different VM's into a RDP. I was thinking maybe do something similar that linus did a couple years back with the 7 gamers 1 cpu I believe? I'm not to knowledgeable with connections and VM so anything that would fit this workcase would be helpful.

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, WebPlayz said:

Not graphical performance, this is for my father and I had built this workstation for him a year ago and he wants to have mutliple connections into one machine with different vm's for each connection. Graphical performance is not the main goal, I had suggested a faster laptop but he needs the battery life and cannot find a balance between performance and battery life. So just clients connecting to different VM's into a RDP. I was thinking maybe do something similar that linus did a couple years back with the 7 gamers 1 cpu I believe? I'm not to knowledgeable with connections and VM so anything that would fit this workcase would be helpful.

How many vms do you need to run?

 

What programs? How many resources do the vms need?

 

Id take the gpu out, its just wasting power if you don't need the graphics performance.

 

Put a hypervisor on it like proxmox, then make the vms, and enable rdp or how you plan to remolty connect to them.

[FitnessOgre]

If I was doing a raw hypervisor I would go with ESX 6.7, mainly due to having the most experience with that product. Keep in mind most of the configuration of the host is done via the web interface. Installing on a workstation make sure that Virtual Machine support is enabled in the BIOS. Hyper-V is second as most people have Windows 10 and it is a reasonably capable Virtualization platform as well. 

Multiple Network ports help, Keep VM Traffic isolated from the Management Traffic.  Though you can do everything with one Network Port, it works better with at least 2.

 

[Akolyte]

Sorry mate but your wording confuses me a wee bit. 

 

I don't know if you're talking about remoting into the same server, but having a different session each time or if you're talking about having different machines for different tasks that can all be remoted into individually. 

 

There are many solutions you can use as a Hypervisor.

• VMWare ESXi - this is solid solution, used a lot, and is free.  However you'll have to admin it through a web interface unless you want to pay for a VSphere Client. 
• Hyper-V Server - this is free, you will need to use a pro version of Windows with Hyper-V manager to administrate VMs. 
• KVM - This is also free, it's very simple to set-up it's just harder to set-up remote connections to it. 

Otherwise you can just set-up a Windows Server if you would like a machine that is the same but uses different sessions.  Windows Server can have multiple connections all using different sessions (You will need a Windows Server Edition), or you can use Linux via SSH which will allow you to do the same thing, depending on the workload and whether command-line is appropriate. 

 

My truthful honest advice, would just be to set-up an RDS Server if you're ok using the same PC with multiple sessions, or use KVM and set yourself up with a remote client, or just set-up something really easy to use like Apache Guacamole to remote into different VM's.  It can also be configured to use HTTPS, or use a VPN, and Use 2FA.  So it can be a secure way to delegate access as well.  

 

Got a few options, let us know how you want to proceed. 

[Jarsky]

If you want the machine to be usable locally and take the complexity out of it, since you dont need hardware passthrough you could just install Windows or Linux (Mint/Ubuntu) and run VMware Workstation. You can put the VM's into the "Shared Machines" in Workstation, and then set them to autostart. You could also use Hyper-V built into Windows 10. 

 

You can also use vSphere Client or Hyper-V Manager respectively to manage them remotely as well....