Cheap and green ESXi homelab – Part II

After a week of giving several hypervisors a try, I came to the conclusion that Microsoft Hyper-V is my current preferred choice.

Why? ESXi seems to be an obvious choice, but VMWare is clearly taking the home labs out of business by silently making the VSphere Client obsolete. I also tried Citrix Xen Server. A nice product, but something simple like adding additional local storage can’t be done through the GUI. That’s just plain stupid, and I don’t like stupid products.

Currently I’m sticking with MS Hyper-V Server 2012R2. It’s free to use, and comes with a nice feature set. Setting up management in a workgroup environment can be a bit pain in the ass, but eventually it works quiet well. The Hyper-V Manager though is a bit error prone when working on a weak WiFi connection with lots of packet loss.

Today I bought a new WiFi router. It’s a Asus RT-N66U. It performs great even through my concrete floor. Ping times are stable around 3 ms and the throughput is 5 times faster than my old router.

Additional posts on this topic won’t be called “Cheap and green ESXi home lab”, because of the choice for Hyper-V. 😉