Morning Everyone,
I'm busy doing a rebuild of my home server and am tossing between VMware and KVM for this build. I already have experience with ESX, we use it at work, but I'm debating trying out KVM for a while. The server itself is a budget build using a Supermicro X8SAX board w/ i7-950 & 12GB RAM, LSI 3081 SAS RAID (1068e based), rolled into a NorcoTek 16 Bay SAS case. Not fancy but also decent enough for home use. I don't expect high performance out of this unit so unless the gear is hopelessly outclassed, I'm not in a position to entertain upgrading. Right now forking over $1000-$1500 on a $2000 system for a pair of higher end LSI/3ware/Acreca controller just isn't in the budget. ;-)
My question to everyone are these:
-How well does KVM support Windows Guests? I'm already running a Server 2008r2 and WHS 2011 (based on 08r2) machines at home which I want to consolidate into this box.
-Does KVM have a concept of virtual switches and and are they tied to physical NICs? ESXi allows me to create a vSwitch that isn't tied to a physical NIC so I can create a DMZ that exists solely within the host system. I'd like to replicate that if possible.
I know these are probably questions that I could answer on my own by RTFM but I have already, and never really got the answers I needed. Pretty much every how-to assumed I'd be doing basic stuff and not dabbling with advanced stuff. I also know that what's written doesn't always match what's in the field and you folks are the field. And with CentOS 6 just around the corner (no flame wars please, my nomex pants are at the cleaners :-P ) I'm wanting to know if it's worth holding off another month or so on finalizing my build.
Thanks,