Hypervisors

[dmull]

I am looking to get a free hypervisor server running to host VMs. Something other than ESXi and Hyper-V. I have tried XenServer and not sure if I truly like it or not. Any suggestions would be awesome!

This is for a home project. The NIC cards I have in it are not found on ESXI, but are found on XenServer.

 

[BlackRat]

I am looking to get a free hypervisor server running to host VMs. Something other than ESXi and Hyper-V. I have tried XenServer and not sure if I truly like it or not. Any suggestions would be awesome!

This is for a home project. The NIC cards I have in it are not found on ESXI, but are found on XenServer.

Are you trying KVM or QEMU? Maybe OpenVZ? You have many ways to do this I don't test this but some time ago, Canonical (guys who create Ubuntu) provided project called "JeOS". Just look at this Maybe it's something for you. Whether your VM must use "PCI Passthrough"?

 

[dmull]

I have tried most of those, however most do not have a Windows Application to connect to the hypervisor to create and manage the VMs.

XenServer and ESXi both have windows apps to configure the VMs.

Do you know of JeOS has a Windows App or a website to configure the VMs?

 

[BlackRat]

I heard about web interface... If I remember is called... JeOSVMBuilder and offer managment by web interface You can check also RemoteBox (But i don't promise existing Windows App) or phpVirtualbox (Web Interface) It is based on free VirtualBox. Check this out and give me replay

 

[dmull]

I did manage to get my nic card working on VMWare ESXi Hypervisor

I had to take ESXi 5.5 and inject the Realtek gigabit ethernet driver .vib into the iso. I then installed ESXi 5.5 (old version) then I had to upgrade it via ssh to the 6.0. Works great now!

@"BlackRat" Thanks again for your suggestions as I did try some of them and did not feel that they were in the same field as to what I was looking for.

 

[iNetBlazer]

ESXi has a free version, but it doesn't come with vCenter so that's a major bummer.
For home use I'd highly recomment Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2012 R2, it is basically server core but stripped more and limited to just running Hyper-V, this is a free version of Microsoft Server and unlike nano which is intended to be an embedded server for containers and docker, Hyper-V server is trying to closely resemble a Type 1 Hypervisor. I know some corporations out there that use it in production, but in my opinion it isn't quite up to par with ESXi or Xen yet, but it is promising.

 

[blunix]

You should install a ubuntu 16.04 on an extra partition and then install either virt-manager (uses KVM) or virtualbox (uses virtualbox). Everything has easy to use gui's and you can just download OS .iso files to install.