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AMD ESXI Build

C

Cottonwood00

Weaksauce
Joined
Feb 19, 2008
Messages
90
I'm currently looking to turn an old computer into a Virtual Host and was looking into ESXI to make it a bare-metal host. Out of the old machine ill be using a Phenom II x4 965 and i was looking to set it up like so:
1 x freenas VM
1 x pfsense VM
1 x ubuntu(plex) personal server stuff
1 x ubuntu webserver(very small) for web dev
1 x ubuntu webserver for dev tools(jenkins and git)

I'm hoping to get passthrough the SATA3 connections so freenas can access the raw RAIDZ array then just pass them to the other VM's using NFS. (i guess i need AMD-V or VT-d) or something?

Does the Phenom currently have the ability to do this and also is there a recommended motherboard that I can use, perferably something with ECC support for RAIDZ?
 
What motherboard do you have? You'll need a board with either an AMD 9-series chipset, or AMD 890FX for IOMMU. Look for working examples though, some boards have the BIOS option but it isn't implemented properly.

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Xenserver Host (big-red):
Asrock 970 Extreme3 R2.0, AMD Phenom II x6 1090T
24 GB Corsair XMS DDR3 @ 1333, AMD 6950 Reference (unlocked)
 
Maybe, it looks like people have had success judging from googling. I seem to recall some Asus boards or at least some bios revisions not working well. I'd try to find someone with a working build using that board to be safe.
 
I use ASUS Sabertooth FX990 R2.0
It works perfect in ESXI with GPU passthrough/ HBA passthrough/ NIC passthrough etc.
It does have a BIOS bug with the IVRS table (Xen 4.3 cannot find IOMMU for instance), but there is a hacked version which apparently solves this. ESXI no complaints.

Excluding the IVRS table screwup, for me it's been a solid board.
Link to "testbios": http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=112013&start=200 if you really need it, I use the latest official from ASUS for my setup.

Machine up and running for the better part of 200 days with 2 shutdowns, both for adding hardware.
Running a mix of BSD/Solaris/Linux/Windows clients without a hassle.

I use this together with an AMD FX8350 and 32GB ram, 2x M1015 cards in IT mode, 1x HP NC364T (intel quad port gigabit nic), Matrox PCI graphics card
Edit: I could not afford ECC RAM, but I have tested Kingstom ECC RAM and it is from what I could tell working.
Edit: Onboard SATA passthrough did NOT work well for me atleast. Will detect controller, will not detect the HDD

Regards
GreatOcean
 
Last edited:
Thanks for the advice, ill poke around a bit and see how it goes with the hardware i've choosen. My fallback plan will be to run BSD as a host with virtualbox and pass the raidz array to them via NFS or Samba.

I've decided If i go this route ill probably just do.
FreeBSD Host
1 x linux VM for Plex/Transmission/(any personal stuff)
1 x linux VM for Development stuff (chef server/jenkins/gitlab)

Otherwise each will run bare metal. Im not to worried about speed because its mostly just for home server stuff
 
I'm pretty much doing exactly the same thing you are with AMD. If I could do it all again, I would've shelled out extra for an Intel setup over AMD. Not for performance but resource saving.
 
I thought about using Intel but that would require me to build it from scratch, im actually using the CPU from my current desktop so i can upgrade to something more recent for gaming. Otherwise i would have put more thought into it. No reason to just throw out a CPU that runs just like an i3, probably even better than an i3 mainly because it has 4 real cores. Either way its way more power then i'd need for things ill be running.

Can you elaborate on the "resource" saving part, are you talking about the wattage or something?
 
after running the 990fx on esxi 5.5 for over 6m all I can say is don't bother. Between pink screen of deaths every other week and vms randomly crashing due to some cpu exception, I'm replacing it with an Intel server board Xeon cpu with ecc ram.

For me, 5.0 was a little more stable, but not enough for critical use (like pfsense as my router)
 
You can try finding a Asus M4A89GTD. I had a 5.1 build awhile back using that board with a 1060t. Supported ecc and iommu with no issues.
 
I've been using the Gigabyte 990FXA-UD5 pretty successfully. I can't passthrough either SATA controller (VM sees controller but not the hard drives) so I had to get a M1015 flashed to IT mode. Been quite stable for me, no issues with FreeNAS despite the lack of ECC RAM.
 
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