Finding the best VM solution for my setup.

[nowwhatnapster]

I am still up in the air to whether or not I should use ESXi or Windows7 + VMWare or possibly some other combination.

Here is my current situation: (Sorry if its long winded, you need to understand where I am coming from)

Currently I have a WHS machine performing NAS and backup duty for my LAN. Unfortunately, I am experiencing some silent data corruption due to the use of my Adaptec 5405 and the ASUS P5N-D motherboard. I previously had a GA-P35-DS3L motherboard in the server and that "definitly" gave me silent data corruption. It's been a learning experience and I am realizing most desktop grade motherboards were never designed to hold anything but a graphics card in their PCI-E slots.

Moving on, I used to host a game server on my WHS machine, however, due to demigrator issues WHS placed too many IOPS on the raid 5 array which inturn caused lag in the game server. So I decided as a short term solution to move my game server to my workstation inside a virtual machine. My workstation is currently using Windows 7 Pro, so I shoved the game server inside the "XP Mode" and gave it a dedicated hard drive and NIC and that solved the lag. Unfortunately, now I have to keep my workstation on 24/7 until I get my server fixed.

I have decided to build a completely new server. The specs are as follows:

• (new) ASUS P6T6 WS Pro
• (new) Xeon W3550
• (new) 6GB ECC DDR1333
• (old) Adaptec 5405 Raid 5 - 4x500GB WD-RE3 (NAS for LAN)
• (old) 2TB Sata (for backup of Raid 5)
• (old) 1.5TB Sata (for second backup of Raid 5)
• (old) 500GB Sata (game server)
• (old) Seasonic M12 700w
• (old) Norco RPC-470 w/ I-Star 4 in 3 backplain
• (planned) Norco RPC-4220
• (planned) 4x250GB Sata Raid 10(game server drives)

I will have some time to play with the new server hardware while my old server is still running. When I migrate my Raid 5 array to the new machine then I will decomission the old server. This should fix the silent data corruption with the Adaptec 5405. I see no reason why it wont work in this board.

So that leaves me with figuring out the OS and what drives to store it on.

Option 1: It seems the simplest option for me would be to purchase 2 drives for Raid 1 via the MOBO and set it up in the following fashion:

• Host OS: Windows 7 64bit (For NAS) (On Raid 1)
• Guest OS: CentOS 64bit (For Game Server) (On Raid 10)
• Guest OS: WHS (If it works) (For LAN PC Backups) (On Raid 1)

This option seems a little less elegant than option 2 as the Host OS must be stable as two VM's are dependent on it. Not sure how I would perform a backup of all these machines. Seems a little messy, I suppose Windows 7's built in backup feature could be configured to backup itself and the two VM's.

Option 2: Would be to try ESXi. Install that on a spare 40GB drive I have kicking around? Not really sure how hard it is to backup or restore the ESXi install. Then the following VM's:

• Windows 7 Pro (For NAS) (On Raid 1 partitioned)
• CentOS 64-bit (For Game server) (On Raid 10)
• WHS (If it works) (For LAN PC Backups) (On Raid 1 partitioned)

Seems a little more safe, but I am not familiar with ESXi so initial setup might be rough. I believe there are some tools out there to backup the VM's easily? I could be wrong.

Option 3: Your suggestions...