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Dell with embedded ESXi worth getting?

T

Thuleman

Supreme [H]ardness
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Apr 13, 2004
Messages
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So I am looking at those PowerEdge 2950's and saw that their warranty expired a couple of days ago. I may go ahead and renew it or I may just buy new gear since it's just three of them, the rest are R510s.

My question is whether the embedded ESXi is worth getting or whether I should just use disks. Embedded would probably save a few hundred bucks by not having to pay for disks, but are there any downsides?
 
custom esxi rom, so you have to get replacement roms / installers from dell instead of VMware, but that's about it.
 
Meaning I can't install my own ESXi on it? I don't actually want to buy ESXi from Dell as I already have licenses. Some of those licenses are academic and they afaik only work with installers downloaded from the academic site.
 
you can't - it's an embedded rom (at least originally - I havne't touched one in a very long time).
 
You could also go the route of internal sd cards or internal usb drives.

We run all our host diskless booting from internal usb drives.
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
You could also go the route of internal sd cards or internal usb drives.

We run all our host diskless booting from internal usb drives.
Click to expand...
When you say USB drives do you mean USB flash or actual disks with USB interface?
Last time I looked into USB flash, which was probably a year ago, I read about issues that came up due to the comparatively high read/write in continuous use as opposed to just using them as "occasional" use portable storage.

What server and flash drive are you using and how long has it been running like that?
 
Thuleman said:
When you say USB drives do you mean USB flash or actual disks with USB interface?
Last time I looked into USB flash, which was probably a year ago, I read about issues that came up due to the comparatively high read/write in continuous use as opposed to just using them as "occasional" use portable storage.

What server and flash drive are you using and how long has it been running like that?
Click to expand...

Most vendors will support you doing this if you follow their guidelines. HP for instance, specifies you must use their usb/sd card that is based on SLC rather than MLC flash. Of course, it costs more (maybe 70$ for 2gb?), but they won't whine and get out of support if you use that compared to another brand. At my last job we used this method and they're still working, which has been about 2 years now.
 
Boot all of my DL380s off of usb or sd depending on the gen. I've only had one stick go bad and it was during a patch reboot, so it's not like it took down a production server. I've never used the embedded option, you can also pxe boot them, haven't tried that either though.
 
Thuleman said:
When you say USB drives do you mean USB flash or actual disks with USB interface?
Last time I looked into USB flash, which was probably a year ago, I read about issues that came up due to the comparatively high read/write in continuous use as opposed to just using them as "occasional" use portable storage.

What server and flash drive are you using and how long has it been running like that?
Click to expand...

So, there were a few issues there.

1. Dell and HP both had a bad batch of sticks. Bad luck, it happens.
2. People installed embedded on $5 sticks. Bad idea. Cheap stick no lasty.
3. People installed ESX Classic on a stick. That cooks it FAST for the above reason you stated (too many writes).

All logs are now kept in a memory ring-buffer (hint: GET A SYSLOG SERVER), so they're not written to disk often.
 
R510 =usb dongle
R610,R710,R810,R910=SD
The dongle has always worried me so I end up going 610 or higher.

If you are really worried about data you might see about getting the internal SD module from a n 810/910. They have a dual SD setup that keeps a redundant disk in case of failure.
Pretty sure it's part#330-6993.
 
Also the 610-910 support internal usb dongle

We have 2950 II's in our office and R710's in our production site so we standardized on the usb dongle.

We bought our USB drives through Dell but they look to be just standard drives...

For our 20 hosts in office where uptime isn't nearly as important we just buy usb drives off newegg.
 
RiDDLeRThC said:
Also the 610-910 support internal usb dongle

We have 2950 II's in our office and R710's in our production site so we standardized on the usb dongle.

We bought our USB drives through Dell but they look to be just standard drives...

For our 20 hosts in office where uptime isn't nearly as important we just buy usb drives off newegg.
Click to expand...

Aren't the 2950's really loud :( I guess if it's in a dedicated server room who cares right ?
 
Thuleman said:
Last time I looked into USB flash, which was probably a year ago, I read about issues that came up due to the comparatively high read/write in continuous use as opposed to just using them as "occasional" use portable storage.
Click to expand...

Except that this is VMWare, and it runs almost completely from RAM. AFAIK, the only things being written back to the USB disk are occasional configuration changes and such.
 
After looking into this a bit I saw that there are also Disk On Module ... erm ... modules.
Basically those are flash drives that plug directly into a SATA port, presumably faster than USB not that speed matters a whole lot, though of course also quite a bit more expensive than USB flash.
 
I think the embedded esxi is the way to go. Less moving parts. Odds are your not going to store anything locally anyways so whats the point.

We got 3x R710's this year and have been super happy with them. Just transferred the license files and we were in business
 
calvinj said:
I think the embedded esxi is the way to go. Less moving parts. Odds are your not going to store anything locally anyways so whats the point.

We got 3x R710's this year and have been super happy with them. Just transferred the license files and we were in business
Click to expand...

Meh. I got my R710 without embedded and it's fine. I used this:
http://www.amazon.com/elago-Mobile-...4?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1326791089&sr=1-4

Along with a spare microsd card I had from an old phone.

I plug it into the internal USB port and voila, all done. Honestly, even if someone opened up the chasis, it is so small and easily overlooked (which I think is neat for having 16Gb of storage hidden in there).

Plus I like not having to rely on DELL for everything (I honestly regret my R710 purchase given that it's so underused, even as a testing platform for some of our programming stuff).
 
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