(Hopefully a) fairly simple virtualisation scenario


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Hi guys..

I wonder if one of your fine gents could assist.

I have a work server (SBS 2011 / Exchange 2010 etc).

I have a fairly simple Netgear router for broadband and a switch for desktop connections.

My server has two NICs, though one is disabled.

I was wondering if this was possible :-

A friends business (in the same building) wants a server, but there's only two of them requiring it (data storage etc).. Could I virtualise a Windows Server install on my server for him to utilise? Licensing queries aside for a second.

I believe he has his own broadband patched in.

Would SBS allow me to use my 2nd NIC for his virtual server? My server has plenty of headroom I believe..

I guess i'd like :-

<Virtualised Server OS> (within my server) So I can then mess about with where he is patched in to the building.. --> 2x Desktop PC (physical units)

So he can have a couple of domain users and take some of the risk of effectively no backups.. He's not looking to use Exchange or anything, but his data is all over the place and not secure.

Does that sound feasible? or am I missing something obvious?

Cheers! :)

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It depends on what you want to do, If you just want to give them access to your network you don't need a second nic on the virtualization server just plug them into the switch.

If you want them to have access to a single vm and nothing else you can create a new vm and add the unused nic to it (you will want to ensure sr-io is enabled) then connect the nic to their switch.

Youll have to make sure the new server is statically assigned an ip address in whatever subnet they are using.

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Yeah.. Sorry.. I should have said, I want it to be separate to my network entirely.

So I was wondering if I could do this and he could rely on his own internet still? We both have basic ADSL running in to the building.

Many thanks for your reply..

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Well then yes you can do this its just a matter of connecting the NIC to their switch and after installing the os on the virtual server setting its ip address to a free one on their subnet with the default gateway as their adsl and the dns as 8.8.8.8 or their isp.

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Yes it is possible but don't know exactly why you would with hardware being fairly inexpensive. The majority of the cost is the os. It is usually 1/2 the price or more of the server. He could put himself in a new box for under 2000 for sure. I can think of an entry level server for about 500 without os.

https://www.google.com/shopping/product/7047071822456524999?q=hp+ml110&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari&sa=X&ei=m6dsUY-AEZDq0QHPz4HwDA&ved=0CCsQrQQ#hsec:overview

This is just one example, it doesn't have drives but you can pick up a drive or two for another 1-200. You can find this system on sale for 500 with a drive if you buy at the right time.

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Fair point sc302.. But he's an action pack subscriber and we thought it would possibly be easier this way.

I figured it would be a case of enabling the second NIC and doing this, but wondered whether having two NICs enabled would cause me an issue with SBS.. I guess I need to check now whether I need the premium add-on for the Hyper-V stuff I'll need? I think I read this somewhere?

Thanks again though guys.

So I would need to create a new VM.. Install lily OS, effectively bridge my connections to update, then static it up to his router to act as my gateway. My VM would be the DHCP server and I'd use google for DNS?

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No the two would act as completely different servers. Yours hosting your network his hosting his. The only thing common will be the box it resides on. Everything else will be as if they were two different boxes.

In the hypervisor, You will assign one nic to your server and that will be physically connected to your network. You will then assign the other nic to the other server which will be physically connected to his network.

I would strongly recommend against using sbs unless you have a powerful server. Sbs is a resource hog with everything it loads on. My wife's company that I support has sbs on a very weak server, it pains me to do any work on it everything is slow...I have disabled everything but SQL because it needs SQL to function. SQL eats all of the memory and causes the system to be slow, I temporarily disabled SQL and the system was easier to work on...so your hair doesn't go grey and your frustration levels stay normal, I would recommend against this path. Also because sbs requires cals, how are you working around that? (Standard is based off the honor system, sbs requires cals to operate).

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Yeah you can do this and its fairly simple to do. I think anyway. Why you just install Virtualbox or something to test it. The beauty is that you can physically assign the second NIC to the Virtual machine. Then the only think that is common is CPU,RAM,Hard Disk Space etc etc.

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