Hello everyone, I am your Master Cao. In the previous two sessions, when I introduced Windows and the black群, many friends felt that these two systems have their own strengths, and they were confused about which one to install, triggering their choice phobia. Today, we will introduce a great method that allows you to have both fish and bear’s paw, installing a virtual machine.
Many friends who are new to virtual machines mostly used VMware Fusion after using MacOS and needed the IE browser, or installed Workstation when doing some sandbox testing in Windows. Both apps come from VMware. However, desktop-level virtualization is just their way of reaching out to the public; in fact, VMware is the global leader in virtualization and cloud computing, backed by top storage manufacturer EMC and PC giant Dell. After the three formed a family, their voice in the x86 server field has also become stronger.
To put it more concretely, such a high-end enterprise service provider has a version of virtualization solution called VMware vSphere Hypervisor, and it is actually free.Note, everyone, the time has come to exchange knowledge for value, as long as you learn vSphere, then your hardware skills can rival those of the old Huang. With it, the 10plus little cannon can achieve multi-functional capabilities, realizing the true all-in-one.
Installing vSphere is divided into two parts: one is ESXi for managing resources on bare metal with x86 architecture; the other is a browser-based interface for managing virtual machines that can be used for free, somewhat similar to using 群辉. Here we will first install ESXi on the 10plus.10plus is a legitimate server, HPE not only provides optimized drivers but also offers a special version image, click the original link for the download address. The installation process is not complicated; it mainly involves understanding its operating logic.
After downloading the image, we create an installation USB drive, the method is the same as before for Win10, using Rufus to burn the ISO to the USB drive.
After burning, we can plug the USB drive into the 10plus, select the boot item on the motherboard to the burned USB drive, and start loading the installation interface.
The ESXi system is not large; the USB port inside the 10plus is used to insert the USB drive for systems like ESXi. Once the installation progress bar is complete, it is considered finished; remove the image USB drive and restart.
Next, we ping the ESXi address obtained through DHCP from our own PC to see if we can connect.
If there are no issues, open the browser and enter the IP address to access our web management interface. The default admin username is root, and the password is set by yourself during the installation.
In the management interface, the first step is to add a storage space to store virtual machines; it’s best to use an empty disk to avoid data loss. After adding, there will be a new disk letter quanshiqu in the storage section.
With the storage disk, you can also conveniently upload the ISO image of the system to be installed in the virtual machine. Note not to use Edge browser, as uploading large files may cause crashes.
Then you can create a virtual machine, as the resources of the virtual machine are allocated by ESXi. CPU and memory configurations can be chosen freely and can be adjusted flexibly later. The system and kernel are mainly for compatibility and preset selection, and are not very important. The key point is to select the ISO image and load the uploaded ISO in the virtual CD drive, which is equivalent to placing a system installation disk on the virtual machine.
Once these configuration tasks are completed, power on the virtual machine, and the rest is just like installing the system on a regular PC.
However, after installing the system, you generally need to find the drivers, and installing VMware Tools directly in the virtual machine equates to having all the drivers installed, but this is only a software-level optimization.
To improve efficiency, we also need to pass through some hardware to our special systems, such as passing the graphics card to Windows, the hard drive to 群辉, and the network card to the soft router. This can maximize hardware performance.
There is also a question that I am not sure about even after managing so many servers, which is as a lower-level virtual architecture detached from the system, how much efficiency can it achieve for our daily applications? To verify, I used the simplest and most brute-force comparison method, bare metal installation of Win10 and ESXi allocating all resources to a Win10 virtual machine for a benchmarking comparison.
Because hardware such as graphics cards and network cards can be passed through, we mainly look at CPU performance. Through R20 benchmark testing, the CPU scores for both the virtual machine and bare metal of a G5420 10plus are both over 800, and sometimes the virtual machine even scores slightly higher. This is indeed not very logical, I speculate that ESXi may have optimized certain CPU instructions, but regardless of whether VM has benchmark cheating, such virtualization efficiency is already very perfect, so everyone can install it with confidence, gaining so many advanced features without almost losing performance is definitely worth it.
Additionally, vSphere not only allows flexible resource allocation on a single host but actually aims at higher-level features primarily for clusters; at this point, not only can three hosts be divided into ten, but different hosts can also support dynamic redundancy and load balancing. Using vSphere client, cluster management and unified deployment can be achieved. Imagine being able to reinstall the system on all computers in an internet cafe by running a progress bar; these features greatly enhance cluster availability and reliability, but the price can be a bit unaffordable. I look forward to seeing our rich friends who watch the video, sharing their experience of building a cluster with 10plus.
Alright, this concludes this session. We welcome you to give us more “likes, shares, and follows. See you next time.
