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Quick ESXi Questions

DeaconFrost

DeaconFrost

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I'm toying around with consolidating my home servers, and I've been using ESXi at work for about 6 months now, so I'm wondering if that would be a good route to go.

I'll likely have one WHS/Vail box virtualized, as well as one Server 2008 R2 box for testing/learning. So, here are the questions:

1. I have an Asus P5Q Pro, Q8300, and 8 GB Corsair XMS2 memory. I was thinking of devoting 6 to the server, and 2 the WHS, or maybe splitting 4 and 4. Would those specs be enough to handle the load?

2. I have 3 WD 1.5 TB drives I was going to RAID together. Is it better to do this using the controller on the mobo, or does ESXi do this (much like WHS)?

3. If I had a DVD drive in the system, would it be accessible to either VM?
 
1. You'll give up a bit to ESXi but not a whole lot. You'll be fine on RAM.
2. ESXi doesn't support motherboard RAID. It only supports hardware RAID.
3. Yes. You can pass it through as needed to the VM.
 
Ah, so I'm taking that to mean my ICH10R controller isn't technically considered a hardware RAID?
 
DeaconFrost said:
Ah, so I'm taking that to mean my ICH10R controller isn't technically considered a hardware RAID?
Click to expand...

Correct, it is likely though that ESXi will pick up each drive separately on the ICH10R controller though, but other than general testing / learning I would not recommend it since there would be no redundancy. check fleabay or the for sale forum for a dell perc 5i or 6i controller, they are reasonably priced, be sure to get the sata cable(s) and battery backed write cache if possible.
As for your drives, you will want to check if you can change the TLER settings so that the drive limits it's error recovery efforts so that you don't have disks "falling" out of your array.
Lastly you will also need at least one supported NIC (most workstation class mobos come with realtek which is not supported) to be able to install ESXi. You can pick one up from Newegg if needed, Intel would be the way to go, and if you can get 2 or a dual port that would be better as one can be used for the service console and one for your public network.
 
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