ESXi on HP Gen8

[SirJinks]

I have a spare Gen8 which I've decided to turn into a small homelab and install ESXi on, purely as a learning exercise for ESXi itself and using VM's to tinker with stuff. The ESXi install will be on a USB stick, I'm a complete newbie to any kind of hypervisor thus doing a lot of reading still.

Currently the only storage is a 256gb ssd, I want to know whether this will be enough volume or I should be looking at expanding it? A lot of the advice on the net appears to more geared to larger environments and raid 5 / 10 arguments.

 

[skyripper]

Your actual ESXi would normally be installed on a USB stick. The 256GB SSD would be fine for putting a few VMs on.
I would steer clear of RAID5/6 these days for homelabs. RAID1 or RAID0+1 is fine for most people, and if you're in to storing terrabytes of data, you'll be looking at storage for that later.

I've run ESXi on both a HP N56, and on my current fugly Fujitsu server (xeon 1260 I think) which is same kinda spec as the HP Gen 8 even if it is in a much bigger box.

 

[memyselfandi]

As above I would normally expect to put ESXi on a USB stick rather than an internal drive (in fact I have two Gen8 microservers running ESXi myself).

Assuming than you mean you want to run it on a HP Gen8 Microserver (as just saying Gen8 covers a wide range of different hardware) I would note the following as well:
- The default dual core processor is fairly week when it comes to running VMs (as its only dual core) hence you may want to consider upgrading it.
- You'll probably want to max out the memory to 16GB.
- There has been some storage controller driver issues with ESX 6.x and the Gen8 Microservers which leads to really really poor disk performance. You can find instructions online on how to downgrade this to a level which performs properly.

 

[SirJinks]

Cheers guys, as my original post states the ESXi will be on the USB (my wording might have caused some misunderstanding) so my concern is more towards the space required for the datastore. The cpu is upgraded and it has 16gb ram so hopefully performance should be acceptable enough. If I'm sticking to one drive I'm guessing its best to stick it as RAID0 via the onboard controller, so if I do need more space I can add another SSD to the RAID? I'm not concerned about data loss as nothing critical will be on the lab itself.

 

[ChrisD.]

Just pass it through to ESXi, I wouldn't bother with RAID.

 

[Liquidfox]

so my concern is more towards the space required for the datastore. .

Depends on how much you plan on storing on it...

 

[bledd]

Use thin provisioning for the vm disks and low ram (so it uses less space for pagefile etc)