Windows 11 Pro for Workstations vs Win Server
Hi there!
I have a single application that needs to run on in a hypervisor'd environment.
I am dangerously familiar with ESXI, and have messed around with Hyper-V at home / spinning up sandboxes.
With the changes to ESXI, I think I'd like to go with Hyper-V.
What would I be giving up if I went with a heavy-duty workstation (Xeon, dual redundant PS, etc) rather than traditional server hardware? Win 11 for WS seems like it will do the things I need pretty well. I am not convinced that I need Windows Server for a single VM environment. This system is a nice-to-have, not fully mission critical (so being down for awhile while things get rebuilt is not the end of the world).
Am I setting myself up for failure / explosions / a rift in the time-space continuum if I continue down this path?
Is this for a business/production environment, or something you’re running at home for fun?
The answer to this is going to be very similar to the question of “do I need to run my app on a server, or can I just get a cheap desktop to run it instead”..
It is for work, but it's not mission critical (just a nice-to-have) and I'd be buying a $10K workstation to run it, I just wouldn't have the traditional server stuff like iDRAC9, etc.
Single user access - it's there to expose an API and it has a pretty dashboard for my boss to look at.
So not a cheap desktop, my question is more around the base OS - what am I missing / what's going to blow up if I go with Win 11 for WS vs Win Server.
Go for a simple os like rocky or almalinux.. its free.. put akvm hypervisor. Set up a redundsnt storage volume like raid1 using lvm. And that's it. Enought for a single vm
What’s the guest OS running? You might be driven by licensing costs.
Application runs on Rocky 9.
win11 hyper v will do the same as server hyper-v for a single vm, but do you not have virtual infra already ? put it on there why waste 10k?
We do, but this application needs to access a totally airgapped network, so we don't get to use our existing environment.
Get a license key for Windows Server 2022 DataCenter edition. Install the Hyper-V role/feature then install VM's
There is a Starwind tool to convert VMDK to VHDX. Performance is pretty good or comparable to ESXI. There are some quirks like Intel SR-IOV doesn't see to work in FreeBSD Guests or at least with the x710-DA2 drivers. Other than that I haven't had too many uses. PCI passthrough is easy and works.