ESX server - Am I in over my head?

A

Aku12

Gawd
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Jun 19, 2002
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So I just purchased a SageTV HD-1000, so the system in my sig labeled HTPC is going to become unused.

I was thinking of grabbing a scsi adapter and drive and throwing it in there and installing an ESX server. Probably add a couple gigs of ram and a few extra nic's too. This would purely be a testbed and slow performance is kind of expected.

I haven't really been able to find a good community for people like me, but I have found a few good articles floating about. But from what I read It seems that that the SCSI drive is the only upgrade I would need to do.

Things I want to do is play with various linux builds, routers and firewalls. And possibly set up a Windows based virtual office to play with things that I normally wouldn't be able to do like AD.

Any help or if anyone knows of a place to better post this point me that way.

Thanks in advance.
 
Depending on the cost, a Dell Perc 5/i might be a better option.

I was able to scrounge up the components for a system for under $200 off E-bay and other sources
Card 50
Cables 25
PCI bracket 10
BBU 30

This all supports raid with SATA drives.
 
That would be awesome if i could get that card with the options you listed for around 100. But right now they are going for around 200 for the card alone on ebay.

Looks like I can get a supported SCSI card (older, performance probably not the best) and a 73gb drive for about 50 on ebay right now (10 for card, 10 for cable, 30 for drive).

I guess another question would be can you put in other drives (sata or ide) for general storage after the OS SCSI drive? I probably wouldnt ever need more than 73gb as i wont actually be doing anything on this other than the OS installs. But would be useful in case I needed more storage down the road.
 
are you dead set on wanting to use esx? are you talking about the freebie esxi, or do you have a means of getting a proper esx license? how about just using the freebie vmware server? the motherboard you have already has the capability of 8 gigs of ram, and has 6 sata2 ports...

i'm running an e4500, 8 gigs, and four sata drives - one for the host o/s and three for vm's. i'm currently running concurrent instances of untangle, 2003 sbs, 2003 std, and several xp pro. just the mini office you were talking about. performance is actually very good...certainly more than enough for learning.

all this sits in the corner of a room, with just a power cable coming out of it...as it is wirelessly connected to the lan. i just do everything via rdp, and when away from home i use logmein. i've even built a proof of concept network for a customer and used this (via logmein) to demo it to them.

give me a shout if you want any more info on my setup.
 
Free vmware server would do this just fine. Performance is more than acceptable.

Have you checked out the vmware community forum? There's a wide range of people on there, from large multi cluster installations to people trying to whitebox it for fun.
 
VMware ESXi would work. Under powered? You would be surprised how well ESXi and ESX scale when the resources (HDD< RAM and CPU) are there. Lots of testing is possible.

I use it in an enterpise setting.

ESX, Physical 2 Virtual , High Availability, NIC Teaming etc.
 
There's no comparison on the performance you get with ESXi vs. VMWare Server. I'll never run VMWare Server when ESXi is free as well. Server is WAY more limiting on resources too.
 
supergper said:
There's no comparison on the performance you get with ESXi vs. VMWare Server. I'll never run VMWare Server when ESXi is free as well. Server is WAY more limiting on resources too.
Click to expand...

Unless he's doing load simulations and absolutely needs the extra horsepower, he can save the $200 he'd spend on a raid card and SCSI drives and get more memory, which will probably be the bottleneck on a system with a bunch of mostly idle VMs (domain controller and the like for a test lab).
 
da sponge said:
Unless he's doing load simulations and absolutely needs the extra horsepower, he can save the $200 he'd spend on a raid card and SCSI drives and get more memory, which will probably be the bottleneck on a system with a bunch of mostly idle VMs (domain controller and the like for a test lab).
Click to expand...

I'm going to throw my .02 in here as well. I find the most important thing with VM servers.

#1 Disk I/O
#2 Memory

I just made the switch on my white box (Quad core xeon x3210, 8GB ram, 7 SATA drives RAID) from VMWARE Server to Microsoft's HYper-V and couldn't be happier.

We run 100% VMWARE ESX w/ infrastructure under our Enterrpsie site liscense where I work. Hyper-V is nice but lacks a lot of the managment tools. For 1 or 2 servers it would work great. I love how easy it is to setup and how fast the snapshots are compared to vmware esx server. It would also be a lot easier to get installed on awhite box system. As long as you have x64 Server 2008 drivers for your hardware you are all set.
 
oakfan52 said:
I'm going to throw my .02 in here as well. I find the most important thing with VM servers.

#1 Disk I/O
#2 Memory

I just made the switch on my white box (Quad core xeon x3210, 8GB ram, 7 SATA drives RAID) from VMWARE Server to Microsoft's HYper-V and couldn't be happier.

We run 100% VMWARE ESX w/ infrastructure under our Enterrpsie site liscense where I work. Hyper-V is nice but lacks a lot of the managment tools. For 1 or 2 servers it would work great. I love how easy it is to setup and how fast the snapshots are compared to vmware esx server. It would also be a lot easier to get installed on awhite box system. As long as you have x64 Server 2008 drivers for your hardware you are all set.
Click to expand...

Even better idea ;) The 6 onboard SATA should provide enough IO, and the money saved on SCSI raid can go to memory.
 
I guess I just spent the majority of my time looking up ESX and its install requirements instead of looking at other options. The VM server sounds like the way to go for me as a low cost testbed. I can basically use exactly what I have.

My board only has 2 DDR2 slots. It would end up being cheaper to just upgrade my motherboard and buy 4x2gb than buying 4gb sticks.

Thanks for the help guys.
 
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