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Good day everyone.
I have a Dell PERC6/i card running a RAID5 array in a box, connected with currently 7x2TB drives. Pretty happy with it overall. I was a bit shortsighted when I first built it though. At the time, I had a dedicated ESX box, plus that NAS, and my gaming rig. The ESX box and gaming rig ended up getting sold, and I got a laptop. Lately, I've been using VMWare Workstation for my VMs, running on my laptop (it can easily handle it, 12GB RAM, i7-2670QM), with an obvious bottleneck at the HDD. But, it's just not cutting it overall. My laptop gets put in sleep mode nightly, and that in turn puts my VMs down as well. It basically ends up being inconvenient, and I'd rather not leave my laptop on 24x7 - couple that with the bottleneck at the HDD, and I'd really just rather offload the VM responsibility elsewhere. Preferably without adding yet another machine.
So I have my NAS. It's a dual-core AMD machine, with a 1TB drive for OS (Currently Server 2008R2), and then the other drives for the PERC6/i, and 2GB of RAM (DDR2). Amazing little bugger for a storage server, and currently running the VM for my DC. (also 2008R2).
I'd like to get a new motherboard, proc, more RAM in this machine. That's the easy part - I just need to find, choose and acquire the hardware and put it in the nice Lian-Li case.
This is where [H] experts come into play... two questions I can't seem to find solid, reliable answers to.
1) Moving PERC6/i from one motherboard to another. I *assumed* and what I've read has mostly supported this, but I simply plug it into the new machine and it'll see my old array there. It may show up as a foreign configuration that needs imported, but it should be fine and data should be intact. Does that seem correct?
2) Running a PERC with ESXi as the main host OS (several VMs, mostly Server 2008R2). Does this work? I've found a lot of conflicting information on this, so if someone has first-hand experience with it that'd be GREAT. I would need some significant guidance on how to set this up though if possible. ESXi will *not* be installed or running on the array, but I need that array to be available to at least one of the VMs to setup a win file server with.
SO, I think these are both straight forward questions and I've just spooked myself when I googled around. Thanks for any response you guys can give me. I'm off to go look at hardware now
.
I have a Dell PERC6/i card running a RAID5 array in a box, connected with currently 7x2TB drives. Pretty happy with it overall. I was a bit shortsighted when I first built it though. At the time, I had a dedicated ESX box, plus that NAS, and my gaming rig. The ESX box and gaming rig ended up getting sold, and I got a laptop. Lately, I've been using VMWare Workstation for my VMs, running on my laptop (it can easily handle it, 12GB RAM, i7-2670QM), with an obvious bottleneck at the HDD. But, it's just not cutting it overall. My laptop gets put in sleep mode nightly, and that in turn puts my VMs down as well. It basically ends up being inconvenient, and I'd rather not leave my laptop on 24x7 - couple that with the bottleneck at the HDD, and I'd really just rather offload the VM responsibility elsewhere. Preferably without adding yet another machine.
So I have my NAS. It's a dual-core AMD machine, with a 1TB drive for OS (Currently Server 2008R2), and then the other drives for the PERC6/i, and 2GB of RAM (DDR2). Amazing little bugger for a storage server, and currently running the VM for my DC. (also 2008R2).
I'd like to get a new motherboard, proc, more RAM in this machine. That's the easy part - I just need to find, choose and acquire the hardware and put it in the nice Lian-Li case.
This is where [H] experts come into play... two questions I can't seem to find solid, reliable answers to.
1) Moving PERC6/i from one motherboard to another. I *assumed* and what I've read has mostly supported this, but I simply plug it into the new machine and it'll see my old array there. It may show up as a foreign configuration that needs imported, but it should be fine and data should be intact. Does that seem correct?
2) Running a PERC with ESXi as the main host OS (several VMs, mostly Server 2008R2). Does this work? I've found a lot of conflicting information on this, so if someone has first-hand experience with it that'd be GREAT. I would need some significant guidance on how to set this up though if possible. ESXi will *not* be installed or running on the array, but I need that array to be available to at least one of the VMs to setup a win file server with.
SO, I think these are both straight forward questions and I've just spooked myself when I googled around. Thanks for any response you guys can give me. I'm off to go look at hardware now
.