ESXi Lab sanity check please.

Rangler · 14 Apr 2011 at 22:30

Hi All,

Just about to order the following and wanted a quick sanity check incase ive made any horrible errors.

AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 840 "95W Edition"
AC 7 Freezer Pro
16GB (4x4GB)of Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9
OCZ Agility Series 60GB 2.5" SATA-II Solid State Hard Drive (ESXi vSWAP partition and vm thick provisioned swap partition)
Gigabyte GA-MA78LMT-US2H 760G
2 x Seagate Barracuda 1TB SATA-II 32MB in (RAID1)

I have a case and 480W psu and an 8 port LSI SAS card with sata cables which should be fine
Works out to approx £460 for a half decent ESXi lab.

Anyone think of anything i've missed or is incompatible please.?

LizardKing · 14 Apr 2011 at 22:44

You may find you need a hardware raid card

Sin_Chase · 14 Apr 2011 at 23:05

^ a compatible one at that!

Rangler · 14 Apr 2011 at 23:11

Just compatible raid card cool thanks for the check fellars time to order methinks.

memyselfandi · 15 Apr 2011 at 09:23

I'd be a bit concerned about NIC compatibility too ... you may need to drop in one or more Intel NICs ....

Rangler · 15 Apr 2011 at 14:22

Sorry yes forgot to mention i have a couple of dual 1000MT adaptors waiting to go in.

Thanks.

ThorpedoUK · 15 Apr 2011 at 14:36

Nice lab!

ecksmen · 15 Apr 2011 at 16:40

If its a lab, then don't bother with RAID 1. Save the cash of a raid controller and get more disks and separate out the vms over the spindles. If you want to have copies of the vms, then clone them to another spindle every once in a while, or use veam to download them to a desktop.

Skidilliplop · 15 Apr 2011 at 16:50

ThorpedoUK said:
Nice lab!

+1.

Where did you get hold of Dual port MTs?
Also you do know they're PCI-X and that motherboard only has PCI/PCI-E?

Not necessarily a show stopper, but if you're going to do any performance testing/benching on it you might want to look at a Pro1000 PT Dual instead. Possibly a PT Quad depending on how many PIC-E x4 slots you have available.
The Dual can be found for about £100 the quad for about £250.

Rangler · 16 Apr 2011 at 10:14

MT's came out of a server that was being upgraded with two 1000GT's, damned didn't even occur to me that they'd be PCI-X oh well time to go look for some more NIC's.

ecksmen · 16 Apr 2011 at 12:16

Rangler said:
MT's came out of a server that was being upgraded with two 1000GT's, damned didn't even occur to me that they'd be PCI-X oh well time to go look for some more NIC's.

You can run PCI-X in PCI slot, you just don't get the full bandwidth. Dual ports will be fine, quad ports and more will struggle depending on the implementation.

matthab · 16 Apr 2011 at 19:56

For my lab I ordered a Dell server off the bay with it all included all the needed bits.

Dashik · 16 Apr 2011 at 21:01

Specification of said server and bits? Just out of curiosity

Rangler · 16 Apr 2011 at 21:05

I looked at a cheap HP server but they only went to max 8GB ram and i knew i'd be wanting more.

Dashik · 16 Apr 2011 at 21:40

Ahh well that depends on which cheap HP server you get

The Proliant ML110 G6 goes to 16Gb, I'm sitting at 9Gb right now

2 x 4Gb + the original 1Gb Dimm.

But please tell us what you got? It's always good to see what others use for tasks. and interesting to see how it differs from your original spec

My spec for a Hyper-V labs server for MCITP Enterprise Admin is an HP Proliant ML110 G6, 2 x 1Tb hdd, I 500 Gb and the 250Gb that came with it. I've added the 8Gb ram and will add another 8Gb shortly

Rangler · 16 Apr 2011 at 22:54

Original plan is to migrate my Ex2k3 + Bes Express vm up to Srv2k8 + Ex2k7.
Need to move my Centos box as well should leave me with 10GB ram to play with

Skidilliplop · 18 Apr 2011 at 10:11

ecksmen said:
You can run PCI-X in PCI slot, you just don't get the full bandwidth. Dual ports will be fine, quad ports and more will struggle depending on the implementation.

Not on his motherboard you can't because there's a heatsink in the way that will foul the card.

Also one Gigabit NIC is plenty capable of maxing out PCI bandwidth as it's theoretical maximum is 125MB/s and the theoretical max of the PCI Bus is 127MB/s Which you can easily munch up if connecting to any iSCSI storage through it.
For Dual ports you should always use PCI-X or PCI-E else you're limited to about 52% util per port. Even in a low I/O lab it's worth doing it right because if you're testing things like load balancing some methods won't work properly if the interface can't be maxed out.

Rangler · 18 Apr 2011 at 14:03

Thanks for the input guys.
Should be getting hold of a HP NC360T PCI-E Dual Port which is a (x4 PCI-E) card which will work nicely in the X16 slot.

beast_gts · 19 Apr 2011 at 22:39

Dashik said:
But please tell us what you got? It's always good to see what others use for tasks. and interesting to see how it differs from your original spec

I use a Sun Ultra 40 M2 Workstation for ESXi. CPUs chug a bit (dual Opteron 2218s) but it's got 24 GB RAM in it and 8 hard drive bays.

Rangler · 25 Apr 2011 at 21:49

Well thought i'd post a quick update, i eventually went with
Phenom II x4 840
8GB ram (Another 8GB next month)
Gigabyte GA-880GM-UDH2
2 x Intel E1000 nics
60GB OCZ SSD drive (Vswap and fat provisioned guest swap drives)
2TB SATA2 Samsung Eco drive.

To say I'm impressed is an understatement

Putting the guest swap files on the SSD make a noticeable difference.

I'm currently running the following
Centos 5.6 with 1GB (AD backup dns, proxy, web etc)
Win 2003 R2 3GB (Exchange,DC, BesXpress)
Win 2003 R2 3GB (Buexec, VEEam, WSUS, WDS)
Win 2008 4GB (remote web app and general play about)

It spins along very nicely indeed, the reporting in ESXi is quite interesting at times too

Think once ive got the other 8GB of ram next month another couple of SSD's may be in order