What product to use?

G

greengolftee87

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 15, 2008
Messages
274
First off let me lay out what I'm considering and you can tell me if its a reasonable plan.

Currently I have:
Desktop
- i7 930
- 12GB ram
Server
- 2008R2
- 8+ hdd
- Athlon II X4 3.0Ghz
- 4GB Ram
- Hyper-V with a few VMs

I'm thinking of basically switching my desktop with the server. I am running out of ram on the server and its DDR2 and all the slots are full so i'd have to start replacing instead of adding. For the server OS i was looking at esxi 5.0. Does vmware offer a free version of this? I am running the free version of esxi 3.5 at my parents house so Im familiar with managing it.

A major concern for me using esxi is I use server 08R2 to serve up files and handle vpn. If I were to run esxi off a usb key and add in a 2 port card for local storage could I pass through all the other motherboard ports to a 08R2 VM? How about usb controllers? My UPS us usb and I use a network shutdown utility on the 08R2 vm as well.

If the passthrough is possible, how are the speeds? If I give R2 a dedicated NIC can I expect the same transfer rates as bare metal?

I hope I've given enough info here. Thanks
 
+1 To switching the server and the desktop. I've been using ESXi for a bit, and am just about to start out on it with 08R2. I decided not to use a USB stick and to just use a very small SSD instead because of this (taken from Pg. 29 of http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/t...enter-server-501-installation-setup-guide.pdf

"Due to the I/O sensitivity of USB and SD devices the installer does not create a scratch partition on these devices.
As such, there is no tangible benefit to using large USB/SD devices as ESXi uses only the first 1GB. When
installing on USB or SD devices, the installer attempts to allocate a scratch region on an available local disk or
datastore. If no local disk or datastore is found, /scratch is placed on the ramdisk. You should
reconfigure /scratch to use a persistent datastore following the installation."

As far as the NIC passthrough, Unless you need something like NIC teaming at the 08R2 level, I would *think* that your transfer rates would be fine without a pass through, just using the virtual nics. That is how I am setting up my lab-- I have two NICs teamed in ESXi to pass all of my virtual machine traffic through, and another two NICs set aside in ESXi for iSCSI MPIO to my storage array.
 
RezQme said:
+1 To switching the server and the desktop. I've been using ESXi for a bit, and am just about to start out on it with 08R2. I decided not to use a USB stick and to just use a very small SSD instead because of this (taken from Pg. 29 of http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/t...enter-server-501-installation-setup-guide.pdf

"Due to the I/O sensitivity of USB and SD devices the installer does not create a scratch partition on these devices.
As such, there is no tangible benefit to using large USB/SD devices as ESXi uses only the first 1GB. When
installing on USB or SD devices, the installer attempts to allocate a scratch region on an available local disk or
datastore. If no local disk or datastore is found, /scratch is placed on the ramdisk. You should
reconfigure /scratch to use a persistent datastore following the installation."

As far as the NIC passthrough, Unless you need something like NIC teaming at the 08R2 level, I would *think* that your transfer rates would be fine without a pass through, just using the virtual nics. That is how I am setting up my lab-- I have two NICs teamed in ESXi to pass all of my virtual machine traffic through, and another two NICs set aside in ESXi for iSCSI MPIO to my storage array.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply. What I'm thinking I may do is raid 2 500s or 1TB drives for the installation and datastore. Right now im installing to a usb drive for initial testing.

My shared files are not in a vmdk. They are on physical disks which is why i would require pass through of a sata controller
 
I have another question before I undertake this. Is raid 1 a good idea for the install location and datastore. Is it even necessary? The drives will be running off a pci sil3114 card. Thanks.
 
RAID really isn't all that necessary with ESXi. It's a breeze to setup even if you have to reinstall. I've only had to do it once from a failed USB key..took all of about 10 minutes, even easier when you have host profiles.

If you think you are going to benefit from a mirrored RAID, then you need to be more concerned about that sil3114 card and make sure it's on the HCL.
 
Vader said:
RAID really isn't all that necessary with ESXi. It's a breeze to setup even if you have to reinstall. I've only had to do it once from a failed USB key..took all of about 10 minutes, even easier when you have host profiles.

If you think you are going to benefit from a mirrored RAID, then you need to be more concerned about that sil3114 card and make sure it's on the HCL.
Click to expand...

The SIL card works, i used it today when testing the install on a usb drive. My only thought would be VM performance. But if you dont think raid 1 will have any benefit then ill skip it.
 
RezQme said:
+1 To switching the server and the desktop. I've been using ESXi for a bit, and am just about to start out on it with 08R2. I decided not to use a USB stick and to just use a very small SSD instead because of this (taken from Pg. 29 of http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-50/t...enter-server-501-installation-setup-guide.pdf

"Due to the I/O sensitivity of USB and SD devices the installer does not create a scratch partition on these devices.
As such, there is no tangible benefit to using large USB/SD devices as ESXi uses only the first 1GB. When
installing on USB or SD devices, the installer attempts to allocate a scratch region on an available local disk or
datastore. If no local disk or datastore is found, /scratch is placed on the ramdisk. You should
reconfigure /scratch to use a persistent datastore following the installation."

As far as the NIC passthrough, Unless you need something like NIC teaming at the 08R2 level, I would *think* that your transfer rates would be fine without a pass through, just using the virtual nics. That is how I am setting up my lab-- I have two NICs teamed in ESXi to pass all of my virtual machine traffic through, and another two NICs set aside in ESXi for iSCSI MPIO to my storage array.
Click to expand...

you just need to use USB device for ESXI OS only, that is the reason installer using the first chunk of GB.
the advantage is. you can use datastore on local RAID/HD, NFS. iSCSI, or other media,
by doing this, ESXI OS and Datastore resides on different location where this is a good practice.you can try to think about *nix world, where the most common practice is OS and home users/data are not in the same drive or partition ( /home on the OS is linked to other partition in the same drive or other drive).

setting scratch area is not simple, if you need to do.

buy a good USB device/flash (for ESXi OS). on my side, I do not see any tangible slowness during booting to ESXi,
 
Well everything (almost anyway) is up and running. I am very pleased with how everything turned out. I'm getting about 85 MB/s transfers from 08R2 and the passed through mobo sata controller. I have a few real quick questions about some loose ends.

If a device is not on ESXi's hardware compatibility list, will it pass it through to an OS that it is compatible with?

When no VMs are running it shows 1 gig of ram being used. Does ESXi really use this much ram or is this the previously mentioned scratch issue. I have ESXi on a 1 gig usb stick and a 2TB local datastore.
 
I don't understand why your not sticking with Hyper-v. Certainly a plus would be the fact that you could run your hyper-v vm's under windows 8 pro in pinch without having to get vmware workstation. One could argue that hyper-v and linux do not get along but since mircrosoft has submited its drivers to mainline kernel guests should work fine soon enough....
 
pingjockey said:
I don't understand why your not sticking with Hyper-v. Certainly a plus would be the fact that you could run your hyper-v vm's under windows 8 pro in pinch without having to get vmware workstation. One could argue that hyper-v and linux do not get along but since mircrosoft has submited its drivers to mainline kernel guests should work fine soon enough....
Click to expand...

VMware player is free and will run fine under windows 8 too, and you can easily convert from ESXi to workstation/player.
 
Again, if the product is already available in the OS (Hyper-v) why would you want to add something else. I own vmware workstation and its handy but I am looking forward to getting rid of it once windows 8 is released. The cost of VMware is really my driving point at this point.
 
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