ESX5i and Cheap CPU, Motherboard

ASE001

ASE001

ASE001

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Stoke-on-trent
Any one had experience of running ESX4i or ESX5i on the following CPU's?

AMD Trinity FM2 Series
AMD A4/A6/A8 Series
AMD Sempron X2 190 2.50GHz Dual Core Processor
Intel Celeron G530
Intel Pentium G620 2.60GHz (Sandybridge)

I'm after a cheap CPU to run ESX4i or ESX5i, hosting two Virtual machines 'NAS4Free' and 'pfSense'. Not very demanding virtual machines, so any of the above should do. Not sure if any of these CPU's support 'Virtualization Technology' or AMD's equivalent though?

Then I need to find a motherboard to suit the CPU, it will have to support at least 4 NICs (5-6 would be better) in total, 3 PCI cards plus the motherboard NIC. The PCI cards need to support VLANs (IEEE 802.1Q) and it would be nice if the motherboard NIC did, but not essential.

Just for back ground, NAS4FREE is being used as a iSCSI SAN host connected to my two Main ESX5i test servers (point to point). PfSense is a firewall (freeBSD) and I'm using this as a VPN host (and firewall) so I can connect securely from my customer(s) or work.


Many Thanks
ASE001
 
I have looked at ml110 range and even fujitsu, but looking to keep costs low. Motherboard, CPU and memory will cost me £120. I have case, Psu, drives etc. the ML 110 only has 4 drive bays, I need six.
Just need to upgrade the system I already have, which is an Athlon 3400 single core CPU and won't run ESX of any version. So it's only running NAS4FREE and I want to run psfsense at the same time.
 
Can't comment on the AMD processors but the G620 does support VT-x for virtulization but not VT-d for directed IO passthrough so you cannot pass network cards for direct VM control.

RB
 
Good point, something I've never needed to use until now. But may be useful when running a VM firewall?
 
Just done some searching on the old www and found that AMD FX and Opteron processors support VT-D and they call it IOMMU. The motherboard also has to support it too, glancing down the list it pretty much restricted to top end motherboards.

One thing I did notice which seems to contradict the processor list that I saw, the ASUS F2A85-V Pro (FM2) motherboard is listed? Unless the FM2 processors have the FX core?
 
So you can do stuff with it beyond simply connecting to a network.

You can also pass RAID cars through, which is especially useful.
 
I know exactly what pass through is and what it can be used for but there is no reason at all to pass a NIC directly to a VM.

Passing a RAID card to a VM??!?! You are totally missing the point of virtualisation.
 
Indeed, it's not pointless but it does introduce limitations with what you can do with the VM in terms of power state and vMotion. In my case my motherboard has an onboard 1GbE NIC that ESX doesn't support but the Windows VM has no problem with, so that's a useful passthrough. I also have an Infiniband adapter used for an SRP target in an Ubuntu VM, so that again is a useful passthrough.
 
From what I've read pass through is not limited to NIC's, but other hardware too?
Would nice if I could get a TV tuner card seen by the a VM?

Hmm got me thinking, USB can be passed through I think, a USB tuner may work?
 
ASE001 said:
From what I've read pass through is not limited to NIC's, but other hardware too?
Would nice if I could get a TV tuner card seen by the a VM?

Hmm got me thinking, USB can be passed through I think, a USB tuner may work?
Click to expand...

Not 100% on the tuner but it should be possible, you can certainly pass usb through, can even pass gfx cards through.

Turn your multi gfx card machine into 2!
 
HarryPainful said:
Why on earth would you pass a NIC through to a VM??
Click to expand...

Segregation of bandwidth so you can provide a 1GbE link to a particular VM regardless of what the other VMs are doing or how much bandwidth they are using on shared nics, infrastructure capacity allowing. With 4.1 the networking was also pretty slow and so dedicating a NIC to a VM got around this. The speed has vastly improved with the virtual NICs in vSphere now so not so much of an issue.

Passing a multi port NIC can also allow you to use dedicated LACP from a VM when using a version of vSphere without the distributed switch (i.e. no LACP from VM to vSwitch).

The other point Shad already raised is that some network hardware is not supported by vSphere and so VT-d is the only way to utilise it (short of patching vSphere drivers).

VT-d allows the passing of chipsets for native use by a VM. They can be controller chipsets on SAS cards, USB chipsets, SATA motherboard chipsets, NIC chipsets etc. Note, some chipsets are not supported and passing through USB chipsets can be a major issue if you pass through the one which you have your USB vSphere stick plugged in to ;). Some devices have multiple chipsets (Intel ET quad NIC for example) but cannot be passed through individually or as a card due to the card having a PCIe bridge. You cannot pass ports, only chipsets controlling ports (ie. all the sata ports attached to your motherboard sata controller but not just one port).

Passing a raid card directly to a VM is very useful for systems like UNRaid, as Nick has already mentioned, but also to allow the disks to be formatted in the native OS filesystem allowing transportability.

In setups with multiple servers running vSphere then a lot of these benefits become overshadowed as the hardware is usually bought with full compatibility in mind and distributed storage may make more sense than individual arrays. A lot of people are, however, using setups with a single vShere server and the free Hypervisor. In these environments VT-d passthrough of NICS and controllers can make perfect sense.

RB
 
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