esxi? help where to start

Tony Williams · 15 Oct 2013 at 01:09

I HIT a button and lost my post so here it is:

I got a high end ish rig:

Coirsair Formula Z
Kingston hyperx 2400mhz / 2 x8gb
AMD piledriver 8core CPU 4ghz

1250W OCZ Gold modular

Can it run esxi? tthen multiple o/s's? its a media server, vpn, router (I hope)

Windows server 2012
Linux server
and a router os maybe

I will use front end xbmc for games and myself

dfarrall · 15 Oct 2013 at 03:26

It sound's like your wanting to use the PC for both ESXI and a normal OS?
That's not something you can do, ESXi is a fully fledged operating system itself.

If you wanted to you could use something like VMWare player to run the VM's inside the OS.

Alternatively you could get something like the HP Microserver and run ESXi off of that.

Vanilla · 15 Oct 2013 at 07:09

There's VMware workstation which will let you run a few OS's on your desktop for various functions but as dfarral said ESXi needs to be standalone.

I have an N54L which i've put ESXi on and am playing with

Tony Williams · 15 Oct 2013 at 10:34

I wanted to game on it too. Maybe get my HPMS sorted and use that and this sep. but I love my cosmos case.

One problem is drivers - cant even LAN

Frozennova · 15 Oct 2013 at 11:32

You'll more than likely need a dedicated network card for ESX compatibility. Intel works are cheap and the recommended

Little_Crow · 15 Oct 2013 at 12:12

Tony Williams said:
I wanted to game on it too. Maybe get my HPMS sorted and use that and this sep. but I love my cosmos case.
One problem is drivers - cant even LAN

ESXi is headless, plug in a monitor and you'll see the ESXi config screen that's all. You have to use the vSphere client from another machine to view a guest machines monitor output - and this is unlikely to be a good thing if gaming.

The other alternative is to use VMWare Workstation, and host what you want within that.

Mr-White · 15 Oct 2013 at 12:18

You'll need to use virtualisation software that doesn't run directly on the host, other alternatives to VMware Workstation are VirtualBox or Hyper-v if you're running Server 2008 or 2012.

MW

d_brennen · 15 Oct 2013 at 12:22

Coherent Tony Williams posts? Well I never...

Tony Williams · 15 Oct 2013 at 12:23

on 2012 but hard getting drivers, not able to lan?

Frozennova · 15 Oct 2013 at 13:03

As I said buy a decent dedicated Ethernet card the Intel ones are about £10 on ebay.

BlizzardX · 16 Oct 2013 at 00:06

It depends on what you intend to do. It is possible to game on an ESXi based machine as long as the motherboard you are using supports AMD-Vi or Intel Dt-i ( i think). This allows you to pass through the pci devices in to a VM enabling the cards or devices within that environment.

IF you can do that, it is possible to 'steal' the gpu from ESXi once the VM boots including USB ports and play games and use it as the main O/S along with other O/S in the background.

I read a really good post by someone who has virtualised his entire families PCs and they game of the central server... Quite clever...

If you cannot do that, then a VM running on the base OS is fine, except you cannot pass PCi devices through to the VM.

Caged · 16 Oct 2013 at 16:07

d_brennen said:
Coherent Tony Williams posts? Well I never...

There is no way you can class that as coherent

traveyb · 18 Oct 2013 at 15:51

If your wanting to game also, you could possibly use Server 2012/2008 R2 with the hyper-v role installed. Granted the license isn't cheap but you should be able to install games on this