Advice for a ESXi Beginner

[Transition]

So on the advice of a friend i'm going to be trying ESXi here for a new server that we're going to be using primarily for the purpose of an MS SQL server and some other test environments for web development, etc. This is for a small business so my budget isn't big. Here's the specs on the server I've already built:

• Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor BX8060195063906846
• ASUS Sabertooth X58 LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard63906846
• 16GB RAM (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL63906846
• 2 x Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
• Intel PCI Gigabit NIC (motherboard NIC not recognized by ESXi 4.1)

Being a complete newb i thought i was going to be able to use software raid. Did a bit of research on the vmware forums and came up with the idea to use a Dell PERC 5i raid card. Also, looks like i'll need to replace those WD drives with some SAS drives? My intent is to go RAID 10. There doesn't seem to be an abundance of inexpensive SAS drives available so that's proving to be a challenge.

Looking for a bit of advice on the RAID situation and hard drives. My budget permits about $1k. Any help is appreciated.

 

[geiger]

My whitebox at home is using a mix of Seagate 7200.10 500GB and Samsung 750GB drives.

These are all connected to a perc5i.

 

[AMD_Gamer]

So on the advice of a friend i'm going to be trying ESXi here for a new server that we're going to be using primarily for the purpose of an MS SQL server and some other test environments for web development, etc. This is for a small business so my budget isn't big. Here's the specs on the server I've already built:

• Intel Core i7-950 Bloomfield 3.06GHz LGA 1366 130W Quad-Core Processor BX8060195063906846
• ASUS Sabertooth X58 LGA 1366 Intel X58 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard63906846
• 16GB RAM (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory Model F3-10666CL9D-8GBRL63906846
• 2 x Western Digital Caviar Black WD1001FALS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
• Intel PCI Gigabit NIC (motherboard NIC not recognized by ESXi 4.1)

Being a complete newb i thought i was going to be able to use software raid. Did a bit of research on the vmware forums and came up with the idea to use a Dell PERC 5i raid card. Also, looks like i'll need to replace those WD drives with some SAS drives? My intent is to go RAID 10. There doesn't seem to be an abundance of inexpensive SAS drives available so that's proving to be a challenge.

Looking for a bit of advice on the RAID situation and hard drives. My budget permits about $1k. Any help is appreciated.

I am in the process of building one also and using the Perc 6. The Perc 6 is newer version of the Perc 5, supports Raid 6 and is native PCIe. You can get them on ebay for about the same price and you do not need SAS drives, any SATA drive will work fine but the PERC 6 does not support SATA 150.

Be advised the perc 5/6 may not work with your Intel motherbaord, you may have to do a pin mod to get it to work.

 

[lopoetve]

If you're going to run any serious DB servers, 1, get the BBWC module, and 2, make sure you have SAS drives

 

[Child of Wonder]

If you're going to run any serious DB servers, 1, get the BBWC module, and 2, make sure you have SAS drives

And run RAID 10. RAID 5/6 has really poor write rates.

Better yet, invest in a small iSCSI NAS. If you're familiar with Linux you can even set one up yourself to test for cheap. That way you have the ability to add a second vSphere host and can experiment with VMotion, HA, DRS, FT, and more.

Get a dual core CPU, 2GB of RAM, two SATA drives for the NAS OS (I'd recommend Debian) and use IET as your iSCSI target. Make sure to get the latest version straight from their sourceforge site as previous versions have issues with vSphere.

Set up a RAID 10 array of SATA drives (4x150GB 10k, for example) for your OS disks then a RAID 10 array of SAS disks for your database VMDK and other high IO apps to live on.

Your vSphere hosts will run out of RAM and IOPS first so invest heavily there.

 

[himmy]

NAS = horrible idea if used for a business, even if a small business. Better off building a white box with a nice RAID card and putting one of the free iSCSI SAN products on it, like openfiler.

PERC cards are nice, actually. We use Dell at my company, and i have 4 R710's and a few remaining 2950's in my virtual infrastructure, connected to two equal logic SANS(SCSI and SAS). RAM will be key, i bet you could easily double that 16GB with that CPU.

 

[Child of Wonder]

NAS = horrible idea if used for a business, even if a small business. Better off building a white box with a nice RAID card and putting one of the free iSCSI SAN products on it, like openfiler.

PERC cards are nice, actually. We use Dell at my company, and i have 4 R710's and a few remaining 2950's in my virtual infrastructure, connected to two equal logic SANS(SCSI and SAS). RAM will be key, i bet you could easily double that 16GB with that CPU.

Nope. Right now Openfiler is using a version of IET that causes excessive SCSI resets in vSphere and the datastores disappear. That's why I recommend setting up Linux yourself and the latest version of IET. It really is a breeze to set up and there are a slew of blogs out there that will give you performance settings to get the most bang for your buck.

My iSCSI datastore at home is just 4x250GB WD RE3 SATA drives in software RAID 10 and watching resxtop on the hosts shows very little command queuing and 80MB/s read and write to the VMs. Couldn't be happier with such a cheap set up but I would not recommend SATA drives for anything IO intensive. However, a few SATA drives just for the OS to live on is fine if you have a budget of only $1,000.

 

[lopoetve]

NAS = horrible idea if used for a business, even if a small business. Better off building a white box with a nice RAID card and putting one of the free iSCSI SAN products on it, like openfiler.

PERC cards are nice, actually. We use Dell at my company, and i have 4 R710's and a few remaining 2950's in my virtual infrastructure, connected to two equal logic SANS(SCSI and SAS). RAM will be key, i bet you could easily double that 16GB with that CPU.

NAS is a loaded term. I know many NAS products that will outrun pretty much any other array out there... I'd love to get a nice FAS 6000 series with PAM modules, 10gbE, and do NFS with it. Works great, and incredibly fast, especially with SAS disks.

There's a huge spectrum in the term

 

[nessus]

NAS is a loaded term. I know many NAS products that will outrun pretty much any other array out there... I'd love to get a nice FAS 6000 series with PAM modules, 10gbE, and do NFS with it. Works great, and incredibly fast, especially with SAS disks.

There's a huge spectrum in the term

That is basically our new deployment standard at work. 4 TB NFS points, with no more than 256 VMs per 4 TB.

Really looking forward to it after just having to deal with a memory leaking firmware version put on our SAN switches 2 weeks ago that just caused us to lose both completly physically separate communication channels to our SAN storage simultaneously for 4 blade chassis worth of boot from SAN ESX hosts.

We have 4 bound together HBAs in two separate modules on each chassis. Nothing like watching your normally 8 redundant paths turn into 0...

 

[NetJunkie]

NAS is a loaded term. I know many NAS products that will outrun pretty much any other array out there... I'd love to get a nice FAS 6000 series with PAM modules, 10gbE, and do NFS with it. Works great, and incredibly fast, especially with SAS disks.

There's a huge spectrum in the term

Nononono... EMC NS-480 w/ FAST Cache, 10Gb, and NFS. PAM? Come on man...that's read-only. Give me the real stuff.

As for no to NAS..no. You can do some really cool stuff with NFS datastores on both NetApp and EMC these days. Right-click and compress specific VMs. Offload clones and snaps to the array. Easy datastore creation right in vCenter. Good stuff.