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Help with ESXi Server Build

M

Mabrito

Supreme [H]ardness
Joined
Dec 24, 2004
Messages
7,004
I am thinking to converting my home server into a ESXi server for a couple reasons. I been using ESXi 4.0 in my schools lab this semester and really like it.

Right now my server contains:
2 AMD Dual Core 2218's
4 gigs of ram
500 Gig Western Digital SATA drive
320 Western Digital SATA drive

The virtual machines I plan on deploying is one for Server 2008 R2, another for Exchange 2010, and one more for SQL 2008 and IIS, and maybe eventually a UNIX Server

To support all of this, I figure ill just buy 32gigs of ram to stick in the server, the processors should be more than plenty. My question is, are the hard drives fine or should I get like one of those new 600Gig Raptors that just came out to host the VM's? I plan on dedicating probably around 100gigs to each VM. I have a couple Terabyte drives I am going to RAID and have them host all my files.

Also how does the licensing work with ESXi? Its free right? In my labs,when we install ESXi, I do not recall activating it or anything. Just making sure?

Whats your guys take? I'm really into the Microsoft products and plan on getting some certifications from them, so im using this is a training setup.
 
First thing first:

Make absolutely certain that your RAID controller (and the rest of your hardware) is on the HCL AND that it does hardware RAID (not software!). If it needs a driver in Windows or Linux to work it's not hardware.

The limiting factor you will encounter is disk I/O: get the fastest hard drives you can and make sure you have a lot of them. Ten 147GB 15k RPM drives is better than two 2TB 5400RPM drives.

Secondly, the free license will let you do most things: Up to two sockets with 6 cores each (hyperthreading is fine). Max logical CPUs you can do is 24 (2 sockets * 6 cores * 2 hyperthreading = 24). You can give virtual machines four virtual CPUs. You will probably not need to pay for a license.
 
doh is right, but don't bother with giving them more than one vCPU- there are only a few things that can actually benefit from them given how the ESX scheduler works.
 
lopoetve said:
doh is right, but don't bother with giving them more than one vCPU- there are only a few things that can actually benefit from them given how the ESX scheduler works.
Click to expand...

this is true, "best practice" if you will is basically 1 vcpu per VM.

you do need to activate ESXi, there is a license code you get when logging in and downloading on vmware.com

EDIT: be aware that by adding the license you turn off evaluation mode and all the fun toys like vmotion go away. I've never let an ESXi evaluation expire after 60 days, it may just keep working and complain about wanting a code.
 
Last edited:
It will keep the vms running, but none of the features will work ;)
 
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