What do you guys use and recommend for networking on Hyper-V. Single or Multiple physical Network adapter(s) in host? A physical adapter connected to a physical Router/Swich for every guest OS or use Virtual Network / Switch in Hyper-V? One side-note: I never have been working with Hyper-V, so these are going to be my first steps into the world of Hyper-V. [fs]
actually, any kind of physical connection will work fine. you can either use the preferred method, one nic for connecting to the hyper-v host and a second one for the vm's, or use the virtual network manager in hyper-v to create virtual LAN's and/or bridges to the outside world. a physical adapter for each vm is overkill imho. as you are able to create multiple virtual network segments with different abilities including but not limited to vlan tagging, you are not bound to a fixed way.
You often hear people advice to separate a webserver from it's database server, so in case someone get physical access to the server hosting the websites they won't be able to access databases. This brings up another question, would it be a real benefit (Security wise) to visualize for example the database server in Hyper-V? FYI, this is not a big corporate website we talking about, just my own little server @home serving some small personal websites
If you can, separate OS network from VM network (using separate adapters) In ideal world the only secure separation is physical separation of machines (hence the use of ie. DMZ) But the virtual environment especially for small development is enough secure not to worry about it. So yes, database server can be quite safely virtualized (and if you want you could make DMZ with either virtual switching or with extra physical NIC) sebus
yes. the main reason behind this is... if some vm / virtual LAN goes fubar, you still have maximum access with maximum speed to the "management" interface. in a small home setup like yours and mine its a different ballgame, as most of the time there is someone.. "you" in front of the physical machine to interact in case of problems. the dedicated host nic is like the management port for kvm's :-D
Ah, OK that makes sense... although our home setups seem to differ slightly, i don't have 'real' physical access to it, it is headless, I mean: that is unless i connect keyboard, mouse and monitor to it My current configuration is as follows: (I am still setting up) - Windows Server 2008 Standard R2 installed on physical PC - Windows Server 2008 Enterprise R2 (Trial VHD from Microsoft) installed on Hyper-V - Currently the setup makes use of 1 physical NIC (Just ordered another physical Gigabit NIC, should arrive from China end of the week if I am lucky) - RDP protocol enabled for physical PC - HTTP & HTTPS protocol enabled for physical PC - Mail server protocols enabled for physical PC - MYSQL and MSSQL Express installed on Hyper-V PC Access to various ports/IP-4 addresses is configured on Draytek router. Does this all makes sense? Or would you advice it to be configured different? [fs]
You could have second Windows Server 2008 Enterprise R2 (Trial VHD from Microsoft) for http/mail (that is if you have enough memory) sebus
Memory is the bottleneck right now I think, only 4GB I think my server, a Fujitsu PRIMERGY Econel 100 S2 only supports up to 8GB, would it be worth to upgrade? Especially for this (simple) home config?
second that. rule of thumb: you should run the least amount of services possible on the physical machine. not only to conserve resources to the vm's, but to limit access to it as good as possible. if your hyper-v host gets compromised in any way.. all the vms are too. and for the memory part.. sure, if you can get up to 8GB with a reasonable amount of money, go for it. what kind of mailserver are you running ?
Definitely NOT worth it! For not much more you could have Qnap or Synology NAS that can do it all in one package with WAY smaller energy consumption footprint (but that is my opinion) sebus
really not worth it. but on the other hand even with 4GB hyper-v can do massive things already. a lightweight http/mailserver can easily run on a 2k8 server-VM with less than a GB of RAM. unless you run exchange
Damn... I tried to use a Windows Server 2008 SP1 VHD on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-v, these are slow as hell and besides that i trashed it after installing some automatich updates which resulted in the famous "“Configuring updates 3 of 3. 0% complete." error... the Windows Server 2008 R2 VHD runs much smoother and seems to need less resources
Another Question, the physical machine has a Intel E7500 Dual Core processor, should i configure 1 or 2 processors for the guest OS? (i couldn't detect much difference performance wise)