Help with Virtualization

[Martsmac1982]

Hi All,

 

I’ve decided I’m gonna go with a combo deal I found on ebay , after payday to purchase a dual xeon and motherboard combo (I’ve also found a pretty good deal on 128GB of DDR3 ECC RAM) , the questions that I have now all pertain to virtualization and what would be the best method for me to go about what I am attempting to Achieve.

 

I currently run one media/file server that has a storage spaces pool of 10TB’ of data (5TB used) which is currently hooked up to multiple drives via a PCIe SATA expansion card. (I have 7 drives in this machine of varying sizes).

 

A DCS (a flight sim) Server that only uses 2 hard drives (one is an NVME drive that the games server runs off) and a regular SSD as the OS drive. Both the above systems are running Win 10 x64 Pro.

 

Then finally just a basic linux mint server for me to mess around on.

 

My first real question is what would be the best way to managed all this storage so that my VM’s only have access to certain drives.

Not sure if creating one massive pool with all the drives in it then choosing which drives are assigned to which machine is the way to go (only got so far as installing the hypervisor on a test pc and uploading the linux mint iso so far just to check it out). I have looked into Unraid but given the amount of drives I have total it seems like this would be an expensive way to do things as I'd need the unlimited version.

 

Finally is there an option to use the existing setup you have (for example I dont really want to have to re install all the software on my DCS server or my NAS server) can i just make disk images and transfer them to the VM's??

 

 

sorry for the wall of text but this is my first time trying this out!

 

 

 

Thanks in advance.

MM

 

 

[Windows7ge]

Most traditionally with VM servers you would create a RAID or pool of drives then divvy out portions of the volume to each VM as needed.

 

UnRAID, Windows Storage Spaces, and I think BTRFS support mixing drives of different capacities. Alternatively you could use something like ZFS and match drives to different vdevs.

 

Transferring images should be possible but how to do that is outside my knowledge.

[namvan]

Interesting to share some experience here but I can follow of what you currently have and what you are trying to achive. Also it is not very clear on the virtualization thingy you mentioned. If you could make those clear a little bit, I may share a bit too.

[Martsmac1982]

i got a little further using some test hardware. I managed to get a windows 10 VM up and runnnig using my SSD and a spare Hard drive i had laying around both imaged with the hard drive images from the DCS server .

 

it worked with one caveat.....my test hardware wasnt strong enough, I was only using 16GB RAM total and a crappy AMD A10 APU.

The issue was that the RAM got saturated straight away resulting in a crash. I have orderd some server grade hardware. Then we shall see if it works much better!