Set up and running but have questions..

[paulheu]

Hello everyone. I'm new to these forums and have some questions I hope you can answer. While I think I know and would expect this to work like I think it does I just would like to be sure ..

So I have a HP Microserver gen9 and replaced the stock dual core 1610 with an E3-1220 v2, so I have 4 cores. I recently upgraded to ESXi v6 using the HP OEM image which went fine. Installed the vShpere client on my PC and from there manage my VMs. There a total of 16GB of memory in the server.

Currently I have a small pfSense VM which runs the obvious and is set to use a part of the capacity of 1 core. I have an Ubuntu server which is set up to use whatever is available on two cores.

I also have a Windows VM, setup to grab 2 cores, an Andoid x86 VM which would and am in the process of setting up an OSX VM whch would do the same, would not run either of these three at the same time.

Now the question is, would this config always see the pfSense and Ubuntu VM share one core and Ubuntu have another and when I start one of the three they grab the other two available cores or do I need to set up some other configuration?

Then I have been looking into the web client but it seems that to use that I will have to install vCenter server, is this correct? If so that would also mean having to get a paid license. What would be the advantages for me, as a home user? Would using the web client allow me to manage the host remotely (not just from the LAN). I set up port forwarding for the posrts needed but when I try and log in somewhere else this just times out.

Any help or pointers would be greatly appreciated.

Paul

[hartehanks]

you said you are a home user , are you setting up a lab for study ? if so , why not use evaluation or better vmware's cloud cred

[virtualg_uk]

Hi Paul,

Regarding your CPU core concerns, you can over commit CPU cores, so if your host (microserver) only has 4 cores, you can actually have VMs running on it happily with say a total of 6 cores, providing they are not all needed 100% of the physical CPU resource (measured in GHz) You don't "really" know what cores are being used by what VMs unless you dig deeper, ESXi deals with that for you. Just keep an eye on the CPU performance settings on the physical host.

As for the web client, yes you will need vCenter to use this (free on a 60 day trial) but if this is just a basic home lab and you just need basic features then your vSphere C# client will work fine for all VM features up to hardware version 8.

VMware have some very good HAnds On Labs if you want to take a look at things without a ab / wanting to install vCenter etc: VMware Learning Platform

As for remote access, you could use the port forwarding approach with the C# client and / or web client, (They both use ports to communicate over the LAN of course) I wouldn't advise this though unless you have adequate security in place ie using a secure VPN.