Esxi home server

[msimpson]

First time posting here, been lurking around for a few days reading various different threads regarding esxi setups at home. At my job, we have a 3 host cluster running on esx 4.1, with a few san's. I'm really interested in the technology and I've been thinking about setting up a esxi host at home just to play around with and to also setup a few things that will actually be put to use.

My wife recently upgraded her PC, so I installed whs 2011 on her old PC for a central storage place and to easily setup backups for our pc's. It was on a dell studio 540(q6600, quad 2.5ghz, 6gb ram, 1tb sata hdd. Few days ago I got bored and decided to install esxi 5.1 on it, to my surprise it actually worked. I have whs 2011 installed as a VM now, which in order for it to run decently I had to give it like 4gb ram so that doesn't leave anything else for other VM's.

So I decided, in order to really have fun and learn more about virtualization, I'm going to need some more grunt. Let me know your thoughts on this hardware:
Gigabyte ga-970a-ud3 motherboard
AMD FX-8350 CPU
G.Skill ripjaw 16gb ram(2x8gb) to start with, can later add 2 more 8gb sticks.
Unsure on the graphics card, just something decent but not too expensive.
Cooler master HAF 922 case
Also undecided on hard drives, will probably just work with a few 1-2tb local drives until I really get into it and learn more. Then I'll start messing with passing through drives to something like freenas, I really don't know at this point.

But definitely will be setting up whs 2011 and will pass through a few hard drives to it. Other then that, just a lot of messing around with different stuff. Various different Linux distros, freenas as I've mentioned above, maybe setup a windows 8 vm just to force myself to become familiar with it.

I'm sure I will have questions as I go, just wanted to see what people thought of my hardware choices. I already ordered the mobo which will be here Monday. I'm just picking up parts as I go along each pay check. Will probably get the case next just so I can start building it as I receive the parts.

 

[Benzino]

You don't want to spend a lot on the graphics card. Unless I'm mistaken, ESXi will install a generic video device on your VM's that is separate from your graphics device. Having said that, you will need a video card so you can see what you're doing when configuring and installing ESXi.
If you want to play with pass through with graphics, then check this wiki for confirmed compatible video cards.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IOMMU-supporting_hardware
The video card in my sig works with IOMMU and didn't cost more than $50.

Go with a SSD for storage. I went the non-SSD and RAID route and it still won't match what a single SSD can do.

 

[msimpson]

Thanks for the link, and yea I didn't want to spend too much on a video card. I just need one that is compatible with esxi. Will probably pick up the same one you have.

Storage: when the time comes, this could probably be a new topic altogether. I "really" have no clue on how to go about setting it up properly. SSD's are so damn expensive, it wouldn't give me much storage space with the amount of money I would be willing to spend on them. Unless the prices have came down on them, I've been out of the hardware loop for awhile.

I guess I should install esxi onto a 8gb flash drive, and work on saving up to purchase the hard drives as I go. I'm going to jump on newegg now to look at prices of SSD's. Thanks for the reply!

 

[msimpson]

It's too bad I couldn't use my nvidia GeForce 8800gts that I bought years ago for $250-300 lol. I bought it to play crysis, and guess what? I played the game maybe 2-3 times and never played again lmao. Oh well, since I knew it wasn't supported in esxi, I told my wife ill put it in her new PC since she plays WoW quite a bit. Funny thing is, I bet the new cards that are dirt cheap are actually better than that big honkin 8800gts.

Storage again: what if I picked up a SSD and used it just for my VM OS's, and add virtual disks from a 2tb hdd for storage on the VM's. just thinking about ways to do it

 

[Grentz]

It's too bad I couldn't use my nvidia GeForce 8800gts that I bought years ago for $250-300 lol. I bought it to play crysis, and guess what? I played the game maybe 2-3 times and never played again lmao. Oh well, since I knew it wasn't supported in esxi, I told my wife ill put it in her new PC since she plays WoW quite a bit. Funny thing is, I bet the new cards that are dirt cheap are actually better than that big honkin 8800gts.

Storage again: what if I picked up a SSD and used it just for my VM OS's, and add virtual disks from a 2tb hdd for storage on the VM's. just thinking about ways to do it

Definitely an option on the storage.

Your data storage disks will not need much for IOPs unless you are doing something more intensive like heavy SQL, etc. But the OS/Program drives will benefit from the SSD for sure.

 

[rtangwai]

You might want to go with the GA-990FXA-UD3 as it is a bit newer. It is fully supported in ESXi 5.1 and the extra PCI-E slots may come in handy if you build a SAN and need to install HBAs.

Definitely don't go big on graphics - I tried it and it's a real pain. I left my HD6950 in there just to fold (I made it a passthrough device) because it absolutely cannot process graphics and feed it thru the console. I've been toying with trying Xen out to see how it fares under those conditions.

 

[wildbill001]

+1 on the 990-UD3. I have one with an FX-8120 (should have gotten an 8350 but that's a whole 'nuther story). I maxed it with 32gb G-skill and have been very happy.

I put esxi on a 4gb USB drive. Keep in mind it uses like 1gb or less so unless you can only find 8gb sticks, there is no need to go that big.

As for storage you are quite right about the cost of SSDs. I'd LOVE to have some but for me and my purposes, I put everything on 1 or 2tb 7200RPM SATAs. Been very happy with the result. I did a quick write-up on my blog (hope it is ok to mention that. If not, mea culpa and I'll never do it again.)

The one thing I am going to add is a better CPU cooler sometime soon. As I start to push the current AMD supplied fan, it gets a bit noisy. But for now I can live with it.

OH, almost forgot. The video card. Cheap since ESXi 5.x doesn't support anything but some way overpriced (IMHO) "professional" cards.

Hope this helps. Good luck and have fun.

Bill W

 

[dave99]

Thanks for the link, and yea I didn't want to spend too much on a video card. I just need one that is compatible with esxi. Will probably pick up the same one you have.

Storage: when the time comes, this could probably be a new topic altogether. I "really" have no clue on how to go about setting it up properly. SSD's are so damn expensive, it wouldn't give me much storage space with the amount of money I would be willing to spend on them. Unless the prices have came down on them, I've been out of the hardware loop for awhile.

I guess I should install esxi onto a 8gb flash drive, and work on saving up to purchase the hard drives as I go. I'm going to jump on newegg now to look at prices of SSD's. Thanks for the reply!

Keep in mind you can thin provision your virtual machines. So while you may allocate say 100gb of storage for a win2012 or linux server, it might only use 10 on a clean install (at least initially, obviously that will grow over time). So a 256gb ssd could easily hold 10 or 12 vm's. (or more if they are all small)

Use a ssd if you can for the OS at the minimum, if you need space for working data, put that on a traditional drive and add that as a E or F or whatever drive in windows.

 

[msimpson]

That is true about thin provisioning, didn't think about that. This is all new to me for the most part, while we do have this stuff at work I don't do too much with it since it is in a production environment. So I think digging into this stuff deeper at home will only benefit me, and perhaps my future career.

Would I be okay with the 970 board just to get started with it? Later on down the line, I may just buy the 990 mobo and put the 970 board in my desktop PC to basically start a new build lol, it's due for any upgrade anyhow.

Thank you for all of the replies! I can't believe I haven't joined this forum until now.

 

[dave99]

You typically run out of ram or IO performance (well unless you are all ssd), before you run out of CPU. Build your system accordingly.

 

[Grentz]

You typically run out of ram or IO performance (well unless you are all ssd), before you run out of CPU. Build your system accordingly.

RAM for sure.

 

[msimpson]

The 970a-ud3 does work with esxi 5.1 right? I thought I read it somewhere last week but now I can't find it. As long as it works and I'm able to pass through, I will be happy for now.