• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

ESXi v4.1 White Box

D

dmelanson

n00b
Joined
Oct 27, 2010
Messages
3
I'm looking to put together a server to run ESXi v4.1. I've selected the following hardware components and would appreciate any advice/input good/bad: :)

Case: Athena Power CA-SWH02BH7
Mobo: TYAN S8230GM4NR-DL
PSU: Athena Power AP-P4ATXK110FEP
CPU: AMD Opteron 6134 Magny-Cours 2.3GHz
64gig RAM: Kingston 8GB KVR1333D3E9SK2/8G x 8

2 500gig drives - RAID1: This partition will have a vm for Win2k8 file/print server.

4 1tb drives - RAID10: This partition will run a vm DEV/Test environment for a SQL Server and Web server(s).
 
What are you using for a raid card? Onboard mobo or something seperate? That's where i've had the biggest issue with getting things working with esxi, hard drive controller compatibility.

Otherwise, That seems like a pretty decent setup. RAM is the biggest thing for VMs I've seen, CPU, not so much. My setup at work is 4x IBM Blades with 2x Xeon X5570 processors and 48GB of ram each. I'm normally sitting at 7-10% CPU usage, and 60% memory usage. After getting permission from work, now running a Notfred VM for F@H, with a low CPU share, and max of 13,500 ghz per blade, and still only hit 60% usage. Don't want to go any higher, else I could cause vmotion to start tossing servers around for no reason.
 
I appreciate your quick reply. I was going to use the on-board RAID controller (Promise Integrated Software RAID). I checked VMWare's hardware compatibility guides for the hardware I chose, but would like to hear about real world experiences such as yours.

Thanks again.
 
dmelanson said:
I appreciate your quick reply. I was going to use the on-board RAID controller (Promise Integrated Software RAID). I checked VMWare's hardware compatibility guides for the hardware I chose, but would like to hear about real world experiences such as yours.

Thanks again.
Click to expand...

I would definitely look for something much heartier then any form of software raid when running VMWare on a single box. I've yet to see it actually use the raid arrays in one yet, and always seem them as individual drives. My bladecenter users Fiber-channel, so it's out as a direct comparison, but I would definitely look for a decent hardware based raid card, preferably with a backup battery. If you are looking to expand in the future, and use things like vmotion, you may want to look into using a separate iscsi server for storage, and run the machine off of a USB drive. It sounds slightly crazy, but I've seen it work.
 
Syran said:
I would definitely look for something much heartier then any form of software raid when running VMWare on a single box. I've yet to see it actually use the raid arrays in one yet, and always seem them as individual drives. My bladecenter users Fiber-channel, so it's out as a direct comparison, but I would definitely look for a decent hardware based raid card, preferably with a backup battery. If you are looking to expand in the future, and use things like vmotion, you may want to look into using a separate iscsi server for storage, and run the machine off of a USB drive. It sounds slightly crazy, but I've seen it work.
Click to expand...

+1 for a separate file server running iSCSI.

If you're going to spend a lot of money, put together two less powerful ESXi hosts and a simple iSCSI SAN. This will allow you to use VMotion, HA, DRS, and FT.

I'm running a pair of custom built boxes at home, one with a triple core CPU and 12GB RAM and another with a quad core and 16GB RAM. Each has a dedicated Gb NIC connected to a Linux iSCSI SAN. The primary datastore is 4x250GB WD RE drives in RAID 10. Runs awesome.
 
Yes, if you want to use RAID with VMWare ESX, it has to be hardware RAID. Go with a common enterprise brand like Adaptec, LSI, etc. LSI 9240-8i and Adaptec 3805 can be had for reasonably cheap.
 
Thanks for your posts. I found an Adaptec 51245 SAS RAID card that will fill our requirements and is VMWare ESXi compatible. Thanks for all your input. :)
 
Netwerkz101 said:
Out of curiousity, is that just native linux? Or are you running something like
Openfiler/FreeNas based on linux?
Click to expand...

Native Linux, Debian 5 64 bit, to be exact. Right now Openfiler uses a release of IETD iSCSI target that causes SCSI_RESETs with vSphere. I've heard FreeNAS is not a good iSCSI option for vSphere right now either. So I just loaded up the latest release of IETD on my Debian file server and it runs like a champ.
 
Child of Wonder said:
Native Linux, Debian 5 64 bit, to be exact. Right now Openfiler uses a release of IETD iSCSI target that causes SCSI_RESETs with vSphere. I've heard FreeNAS is not a good iSCSI option for vSphere right now either. So I just loaded up the latest release of IETD on my Debian file server and it runs like a champ.
Click to expand...

You should try OpenFiler 2.99 (hit the irc channel for a link). It uses LIO ISCSI target and I finally got Server2008 clustering to work with it.
 
Hey Child, saw you in the IRC chat. Let me know how 2.99 works out for ya. I got clustering set up but then all networking blew up. This has happened on 2 ESXi 4.1 servers now. Our ESXi 4.0 server has been using 2.3 and 2.99 just fine. I'm sure it's some stupid setting we're missing (dedicated onboard Broadcrap NIC to dedicated Vswitch using software initiator, not Broadcom with TOE on Dell T710).
 
I had tons of issues with SCSI_Resets using Openfiler 2.3 and ESX 4 which is a known issue with older versions of IETD and vSphere.

The reason for the networking issue is due to the latest Broadcom driver included in vSphere 4.0 and 4.1. If you're running ESXi and having these issues you're pretty much fucked until they release a patch unless you reinstall your hosts with ESX and install the work around (older driver).

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/mi...nguage=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1016012

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1581517
 
FUCK!! Well that settles it. When the bean counters tell me the Intel NICS are too expensive, I'm going to tell them to go fuck themselves with a sharp object.
Well resolved our network problems and finally go LIO target implemented.
 
Last edited:
FWIW you really don't need a power supply that strong, I've got an 850 in mine with 8 hard disks and an HD5830 and it nowhere near pushes it. this is what I have in my single-cpu G34 box. Also you need 2 EPS12 connectors and that one looks like it only has 1 whereas the seasonic has 2.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top