Your home ESX server lab hardware specs?

Rebuilding my Charlotte lab...installed a new EMC VNX5300 today. Here it is sitting on top of the Cisco UCS gear.

Charlotte_VNX5300.jpg
 
NetJunkie said:
Rebuilding my Charlotte lab...installed a new EMC VNX5300 today. Here it is sitting on top of the Cisco UCS gear.
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Hey, great blog, been reading lots of your info. GOOD STUFF..

Will be in the states in a few days doing EMC training for 2 weeks.


I will post pictures and training of the full 2 weeks on my blog.
 
Thanks! Where you be? Up in Mass?

Spent some time working in the lab today playing with the VNX. FAST Cache is like a turbo button. :) Also got the VMware environment up on the UCS blades. About to order a couple more blades for that...
 
NetJunkie said:
Thanks! Where you be? Up in Mass?

Spent some time working in the lab today playing with the VNX. FAST Cache is like a turbo button. :) Also got the VMware environment up on the UCS blades. About to order a couple more blades for that...
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So how many labs do you have? You said that is the Charlotte lab? Which one was used for Train Signal?
 
AMD_Gamer said:
So how many labs do you have? You said that is the Charlotte lab? Which one was used for Train Signal?
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Have the one here in Charlotte that I normally use...one in our Greensboro office that we used for the Trainsignal video as there is more room in that lab. The Charlotte lab is for customer demos for the pre-sales guys...the Greensboro lab is for the engineers to break/fix. I just got two new Nexus 5500s and two Nexus 2Ks for that lab this week.
 
NetJunkie said:
Thanks! Where you be? Up in Mass?

Spent some time working in the lab today playing with the VNX. FAST Cache is like a turbo button. :) Also got the VMware environment up on the UCS blades. About to order a couple more blades for that...
Click to expand...

malvern pennsylvania for 2 weeks, i fly there tomorrow ( sunday here today )

Will be adding lots to my blog every day... :D
 
Home:
2.JPG


NZXT Hush HU001 Case
AMD FX-6100 Black Edition AM3+
Asus M5A88 Motherboard
Intel PRO 1000 dual port gig-e adapter
Patriot 8GB USB
ESXi 5

Dell Inspiron 531s Slim PC
AMD Athlon X2 5200
Intel PRO 1000 dual port gig-e adapter
Patriot 8GB USB
ESXi 4.1

Netgear ReadyNAS as NFS Datastore

Right now sitting at 21 VMs.. yes not a great VM density number per host but my SAN backend is starting to chug


Office: :cool:
clus-p1.jpg


This is just one of about a dozen clusters
 
New ESXi server for basic tasks and to host a couple of UBER VSA's for the vCloud lab and SRM testing. Also finally got a great deal on ebay for an HP 1800-24, should be arriving next week.

Received the wrong server chassis, instead of sending it back and paying for shipping..just had to mod it.



 
Don't rule out the new Iomega PX line in your search. I have the PX4-300d and I love it.
 
Vader said:
Don't rule out the new Iomega PX line in your search. I have the PX4-300d and I love it.
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Except the larger PX6 hasn't benchmarked as well as others in its price range. I'm a huge EMC reseller and I don't even have an Iomega...though I should ask them to send me one to play with. They don't give us any decent discounts on them. They do have some pretty cool cloud integration features though and I'm very happy to see them release diskless versions.
 
I want VAAI and cheap SSD though...lol...with disks now up to 4TB throw 3 in a RAID 5 array and have a large SSD for high I/O, use storage drs or have some sort of tiering.

Can't wait until larger SSD comes down in price.
 
Me too. I'd love to see VAAI with NFS and iSCSI on these boxes..would be an instant lab hit. Trying to get Synology to seriously look at it. In a year I could see my lab DS1010+ being all SSD. Crazy thing is if I do that...it'll be faster than a lot of EMC arrays I've sold over the last couple years.
 
That is crazy....SSD is certainly disruptive tech and was definately needed with the days of massive multi-core and high bandwidth/wide bus interconnects;).
 
Any opensource software do storage tiering? Might change my mind and just build a storage server instead.

This looks kinda interesting but still reading about it
http://code.google.com/p/fscops/

nm, doesnt look like its been updating in a while
 
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NetJunkie said:
Me too. I'd love to see VAAI with NFS and iSCSI on these boxes..would be an instant lab hit. Trying to get Synology to seriously look at it. In a year I could see my lab DS1010+ being all SSD. Crazy thing is if I do that...it'll be faster than a lot of EMC arrays I've sold over the last couple years.
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How many EMC systems have you sold / setup ? Where did you go for your training..
 
dashpuppy said:
How many EMC systems have you sold / setup ? Where did you go for your training..
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A lot. We were EMC's commercial partner of the year nationwide the last two years and we're a smaller (~54 people as of today) VAR. All my EMC training is on the job and in the lab. I've never actually sat in an EMC training class. Just put a new VNX5300 in my Charlotte lab to play with...have a NS-120 in my other lab. Can go to the main RTP lab about any time I want for stuff...so I take advantage of those resources.

Maybe I should do some HardForum EMC and Cisco UCS WebExs sometime. :)
 
NetJunkie said:
A lot. We were EMC's commercial partner of the year nationwide the last two years and we're a smaller (~54 people as of today) VAR. All my EMC training is on the job and in the lab. I've never actually sat in an EMC training class. Just put a new VNX5300 in my Charlotte lab to play with...have a NS-120 in my other lab. Can go to the main RTP lab about any time I want for stuff...so I take advantage of those resources.

Maybe I should do some HardForum EMC and Cisco UCS WebExs sometime. :)
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Yeah i watch your bogs and stuff, interesting stuff for sure. I know i was taking pictures and working on near EOL stuff BUT it's just the starting of the training path for me.. You get to install / repair newer stuff, in therory its all the same just faster..
 
Some things change..especially with the VNX. The VNX 5300 was the first one I actually touched. Being in pre-sales I don't touch as much gear at customer sites as you would think. I get brought in for big VMware/networking type issues but rarely storage. VNX is totally diff on how you connect it all up and they all have Unisphere. But even the first time I did it I had no issue..very easy.
 
NetJunkie said:
Some things change..especially with the VNX. The VNX 5300 was the first one I actually touched. Being in pre-sales I don't touch as much gear at customer sites as you would think. I get brought in for big VMware/networking type issues but rarely storage. VNX is totally diff on how you connect it all up and they all have Unisphere. But even the first time I did it I had no issue..very easy.
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You need to get your hands dirty on the implementation side, NetJunkie. :) I've run into a few problems with the VNX, most notably the inability to update the NAS code with USM when using dual Control Stations.

Thankfully that's FINALLY being fixed one year later.
 
altivec said:
Motherboard: Biostar TH67B LGA1155
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did you have any problems installing esxi 5 with that mobo? im looking for a budget micro LGA1155 mobo that doesnt have any incompatible issues. (other than the onboard nic)
 
drstk said:
did you have any problems installing esxi 5 with that mobo? im looking for a budget micro LGA1155 mobo that doesnt have any incompatible issues. (other than the onboard nic)
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No it's working great until now.

I had i3-2100 first in it and now i have upgraded to i7-2600k.
I am running about 10 to 25 VM in average between the two cluster.

The build in NIC work flawless in esxi5 but i also have dual Intel server nic in them.
 
altivec said:
No it's working great until now.

I had i3-2100 first in it and now i have upgraded to i7-2600k.
I am running about 10 to 25 VM in average between the two cluster.

The build in NIC work flawless in esxi5 but i also have dual Intel server nic in them.
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cool. and nice to know that the onboard nic works! ordering this with an i3-2100 + 8GB RAM. i want a budget host to play with vmotion and 1000v.

thanks for the reply.
 
16Gb cost nothing and are worth it. I would definitely go with 16Gb from start.
Also note that the board now support 32Gb or RAM, not 16Gb like some site says (NewEgg).
 
wtf newegg lol. yeah i thought it was 16GB max.... planning to upgrade RAM later. right now im going to run only 3 VMs on it.
 
yeah i went straight to the product website after u mentioned it. nice to know that now.
 
QHalo said:
Did you put this in your X8SIL-F-O's and it worked ok? The price is super cheap and I'm thinking about maxing my two hosts.
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Yep. Working great. About to order more. Some of these new appliances (vCOPs and Infra Navigator) like RAM.
 
Here's my Silverstone SG02B-F, VMWARE ESXi server.




ESXi is installed on the USB-stick right there.




Components:
  • MB: Gigabyte GA-880GM-USB3
  • CPU: AMD Phenom II X6 1055T
  • RAM: Corsair XMS3 PC-10666DDR3 16GB
  • GPU: Integrated
  • PSU: Corsair CX430
  • HDD: Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB
  • Ethernet: HP NC380T
  • OS: VMWARE ESXi
 
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Original setup (two dual single-core Xeons)

Second setup (Phenom II X4

Current:

Antec 300 (Scythe S-flex: two front intake, one side intake, one rear exhaust; Antec tri-cool 140mm top exhaust)
ASUS P8B WS (C206 chipset) with an i5-2400S under a CoolerMaster Hyper 212+
16GB DDR3-1333 (4x4GB)
IBM M1015 flashed to 9211-8i IT firmware
Intel PCI dual-port 10/100 NIC
4x WD RAID Edition 250GB drives
2x Seagate Barracuda LP 500GB drives
2x Hitachi CoolSpin 3TB drives
1x Seagate 5400.3 160GB 2.5" drive
4GB SanDisk USB flash drive on internal header (ESXi 5 boot drive)

This is my jump to an AIO solution using OpenIndiana w/ Napp-it. The notebook drive is the "local" datastore on the onboard SATA with OI installed on it. M1015 is passed through to the OI VM, which is controlling the other 8 drives (250's in RAID10 equivelent, 500's and 3TB's in mirrors). The RAID10 is then shared via NFS, and ESXi uses that as a datastore.

I'm happy with the performance so far in what little I've done with it yet. Don't have much time to play anymore between the new house, a toddler, and a job that doesn't benefit at all from virtualization more advanced than XP Mode.

Hopefully some day in the not-so-distant future 8GB ECC UDIMMs will drop in price; at that point, I'll pick up an E3-1235 or its Ivy Bride equivelent and make the jump to at least 24GB. Aside from that, I'd like to add a few more 3TB's and replace the super-old first-gen WD RE drives with either some VR's or SSD's.
 
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