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Home ESXi server budget build

J

Jerry_03

Weaksauce
Joined
Oct 12, 2009
Messages
92
I currently have a 24/7 Win 2008 Server that is my file server/plex media server.

I want to convert this server to a ESXi bare metal hypervisor and run at least 3 VMs on it at the same time.

The specs of my current Win 2008 Server:
Intel Core i3-3220 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz
ECS H61H2-I3 (v1.0) LGA 1155 Intel H61
Patriot Gamer 2 Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3
TOSHIBA DT01ACA200 2TB 7200 RPM SATA
Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB 5900RPM SATA

Now i want to be able build this ESXi Server using as much of the above components as possible.

Requirements for my ESXi Server:
-Win7 VM for 24/7 Plex server 1
-Win7 VM for 24/7 Plex server 2
-Win Server 08 VM for 24/7 FTP, File server, AD, bittorrent
-Linux VM for testing (not 24/7)
-Good ratio of performance to power consumption

Is the above CPU good enough for running my 3 VMs 24/7? Does the i3 even support virtualization?
are the 8GB RAM be good enough? would 16GB be better?
i read that esxi is very choosey with NICs, the mobo's intergrated NIC is a Realtek 8111E Gigabit ethernet would this give me any grief?
 
Your CPU supports VT-x so it's fine to run ESXi (for info: it does not supports VT-d and you will not be able to do any hardware passthrough).
It's powerful enough to run what you need and HT will help a little bit.
Your NIC is no more supported in the default ESXi 5.5 iso, but you can "inject" the drivers (google will help you)
If you don't want to buy more RAM I suggest you the following assignment
- Win srv: 3GB
- Win 7#1: 1.5GB
- Win 7#2: 1.5GB
- Remaining will be for the host and the linux test vm

Anyway 16GB will be much better..
 
I forgot to mention I have a i3-3240 in my day-to-day desktop. the only difference between this and the i3-3220 is its 1GHz faster. Thinking of switching the CPUs. When it comes to visualization is the CPU frequency important? though if it is i doubt i would really notice the 1GHz difference, lol.

i think i may add more RAM, ill keep my eyes peeled for sales on newegg/amazon.

also ill look into the NIC drivers injection

thanks for your advice
 
You are going to need more hard drives otherwise you will run into some I/O issues depending on usage. All of that running on a single 5200rpm drives seems like it would be a I/O nightmare to me.
 
So i saw a great deal on desktop RAM on tigerdirect last week: PATRIOT 16GB DDR3 (2 x 8GB) 1600MHz for $125 -$20 Instant Rebate -$25 Mail in rebate = $80 after rebates so i nabbed that

Now about the hard drives, I plan to run most of VMs off the Toshiba HDD as its 7200RPM and maybe one on the seagate. something like this:

Toshiba 7200RPM HDD:
-Win Server 08 VM for 24/7 FTP, File server, AD, bittorrent
-Win7 VM for 24/7 Plex server 1
-Linux VM for testing (not 24/7)

Seagate 5900RPM HDD:
-Win7 VM for 24/7 Plex server 2

would there be any write/read IO issues with this kind of setup? Or would it be better to just trade the 5900RPM for another 7200RPM HDD?
 
Just curious why 2 plex servers?
I can't think of any reason to have two plex servers.

As far as your I/O is concerned, it really kind of depends on the usage this will have. Is it just you and a roommate streaming stuff from it, maybe the occasional FTP transfer? You will probably be fine. Going in a dorm with like 10+ people streaming, people accessing the FTP server from the outside? a lot of torrents going on? might want to look into considering spacing the data across more drives.

I recommend 3 drives at minimum myself.

1 - OS - Where you install OS's. For the most part the OS themselves don't do much drive I/O.
2 - Uploads drive - this is where all new data that comes down goes. Like when torrenting all stuff you download go here temporarily until you are ready to move it to its permanent home.
3 - Data - Movies Music ISOs etc go here.
 
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Upgrade the RAM and grab an SSD for the VM datastore. A 64GB should be more than enough for what you're wanting to run. Your OS does not have to be installed on the same drive that your data is stored on.

With virtualization the CPU speed isn't nearly as important as the memory available. Take a look at the CPU usage report from you Win2008 server and most likely you will see average use down in the 15-20% range. However, i'd be surprised if your current server uses less than 6GB of RAM on average.

Also I'd look into running Plex on Ubuntu as it will require much less in terms of system resources than running it inside of Windows 7. And as stated in some other posts ... why two separate plex servers?

I've got a very similar setup running at home currently on two Intel i3 NUCs. If you'd like to chat with me more about it, I'd love to talk.
 
two plex servers because plex doesnt have a way to separate 'profiles' or content by parental rating. nor does it allow to run more than one instance of plex with a different library on the same system. I want one VM running plex that has R rated Movies, TV Shows and and the other with PG kids shows. when I want to watch the R rated shows I would keep the plex server up on the VM with said content. when my kid watches his PG shows, I would turn off the R rated plex and turn on the VM with the PG content. I already tried this with Virtualbox, so I know it would work.

as for running plex on linux, I will look into that, seems like a better idea from a resource point of view.

it really wont have a lot of usage, occasional FTP access from outside the network, at most three different connections streaming media off of it. and some torrenting.

I do like the idea of separating the data across different hard drives though.

Im just curious as to how could the OS's be on a separate drive? I mean is there a way to put the guest VM's OS on a seperate physical drive while having data on another physical HDD? for example:

Physical HD 1:
-VM A's OS installed here
-VM B's OS installed here
-VM C's OS installed here

Physical HD 2:
-VM A's upload data here

Physical HD 3:
-VM B's media data here
-VM C's media data here
 
Jerry_03 said:
two plex servers because plex doesnt have a way to separate 'profiles' or content by parental rating. nor does it allow to run more than one instance of plex with a different library on the same system. I want one VM running plex that has R rated Movies, TV Shows and and the other with PG kids shows. when I want to watch the R rated shows I would keep the plex server up on the VM with said content. when my kid watches his PG shows, I would turn off the R rated plex and turn on the VM with the PG content. I already tried this with Virtualbox, so I know it would work.
Click to expand...
Huh.Kinda neat there.

Jerry_03 said:
Im just curious as to how could the OS's be on a separate drive? I mean is there a way to put the guest VM's OS on a seperate physical drive while having data on another physical HDD? for example:
Click to expand...
Yes there is a way. I've done exactly that with VirtualBox so doing so with ESXi should not be a problem. The concept is simple: Just create a virtual hard drive that's stored on another physical hard drive and then pass it along to the virtualized OS.
 
Dangman said:
Yes there is a way. I've done exactly that with VirtualBox so doing so with ESXi should not be a problem. The concept is simple: Just create a virtual hard drive that's stored on another physical hard drive and then pass it along to the virtualized OS.
Click to expand...

ah i see, seems simple
 
Jerry_03 said:
two plex servers because plex doesnt have a way to separate 'profiles' or content by parental rating. nor does it allow to run more than one instance of plex with a different library on the same system. I want one VM running plex that has R rated Movies, TV Shows and and the other with PG kids shows. when I want to watch the R rated shows I would keep the plex server up on the VM with said content. when my kid watches his PG shows, I would turn off the R rated plex and turn on the VM with the PG content. I already tried this with Virtualbox, so I know it would work.
Click to expand...

Interesting, I never really thought of that. I have no reason to separate shows of different ratings atm, but that's nice to know for the future. You should write the devs and ask for that as an option. I could definitely see people finding a use for that.
 
Jerry_03 said:
ah i see, seems simple
Click to expand...

Yeah its pretty darn simple with ESXi.
One thing I forgot to mention, and it is quite important.

I have helped quite a few people jump on the ESXi bandwagon and I always forget to mention this before its too late. ESXi VMs will NOT read their native drive formats. I'm horrible at explaining this so hopefully someone else might be able to chime in a better explanation.

ESXi has its own format. Like how MS windows has NTFS/FAT32. When you have drives on ESXi they are formatted as ESXi's proprietary format. I think its called vmfs5 or something like that. Lets say you have a Win7 VM. When you are in that VM and looking at its hard drive it will be as far as its concerned a happy normal NTFS drive. But in reality when you pull out and look at it from ESX that drive store is actually ESX's format. So you can't say make a Win2k8 VM and then pull the data drive that has all your movies and what not from your old Win2k8 server, stick it in your new ESXi host and away you go. ESXi would have to format that drive to its filesystem therefore erasing everything on it.

This issue however can be bypassed if you have what is called "IOMMU aka Passthrough (AMD)". I think Intel has another name for it. I'll let you do your own research on that.

I've had a couple people get all happy about ESXi get it all installed ready to go, then try to grab their old hard drive and just throw it into the ESXi box and expect all their data to be ready to go. So if you already have data on these drives you are talking about, you are going to have to do some shuffling around, or backup to elsewhere then bring back over.
 
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