Virtualization options for nMP?

[skywiseca]

I'm looking to justify ordering a nMP (I know, if I need to justify, I shouldn't, but I want! 🙂
I currently run a mini as my desktop and a beige box running ESXi as my home server farm. (Home Automation, media server, CCTV server, etc)
Could I shut down the ESXi box and move the VMs into a mac pro in a more 'server' way than Parallels or Fusion could do? (all the VMs are linux, I don't need to see the screens/consoles)

I guess the biggest issue would be that I do need to restart my current OSX desktop from time to time and that would put a bit of a kink in all my VMs if they had to restart often.

If all else fails I suppose I could use the mini as my ESXi server, at least it'd be small/low power.
(There's a big NAS doing all the major data holding for the house so big HDs aren't needed)

 

[MrGimper]

I'm looking to justify ordering a nMP (I know, if I need to justify, I shouldn't, but I want! 🙂
I currently run a mini as my desktop and a beige box running ESXi as my home server farm. (Home Automation, media server, CCTV server, etc)
Could I shut down the ESXi box and move the VMs into a mac pro in a more 'server' way than Parallels or Fusion could do? (all the VMs are linux, I don't need to see the screens/consoles)

I guess the biggest issue would be that I do need to restart my current OSX desktop from time to time and that would put a bit of a kink in all my VMs if they had to restart often.

If all else fails I suppose I could use the mini as my ESXi server, at least it'd be small/low power.
(There's a big NAS doing all the major data holding for the house so big HDs aren't needed)

Really you want to keep ESXi as the server virtualisation platform. Whether that stays on the "Beige Box" or on the Mac Mini, that's up to you.

As you mention, your only options on the mac, if you still want to use it as a workstation, are Parallels, Fusion and some others. However, if you reboot your mac, the VMs will also have to go down.

I build an i7 64GB PC to run ESXi and it's running about 12 VMs.

 

[shaunp]

I guess it depends what the workload is and how much memory they need. You could just run fusion on the Mini. I've run fusion for years and it's been fine. I wouldn't class it as 'business class' virtualisation and definitely not enterprise, but putting things into perspective, do you really need all of these features in a home environment? Just the ability to run the apps you want on a single machine is probably what you are wanting.

Personally I think the nMP is too focused on professional graphics to be of much use to me as a home VM farm. I've gone down the beige box route (with vm workstation), but I use this as a desktop for gaming too. If you want to do this with a mac and want a headless device that can just sit there running a handfull of VM's I'd have a mini running fusion. There's also the HP Microserver, this supports ESXi and has an internal USB to boot from. And they only cost around £200.

 

[skywiseca]

Yeah, that's what I thought.
Guess I'll need to justify it some other way.
"But dear, it looks so good in the living room!"

Thanks for the replies.