The (un)Official VMWare ESXi thread.

If you are going to install VMware vCenter 5.5 on 2012 R2, you will need to copy "ocsetup.exe" from ether Server 2012 or 2008R2 as they deprecated the command in 2012 R2.

Also vCenter 5.5 is not officially supported on Server 2012 R2 yet. VMware KB2061000
 
Hi, sorry if this has been asked before but I couldn't see it.

I've been running a Windows Server 2012 standard with another server 2012 VM for exchange in Hyper-v. I've had an issue whereby all my media recordings (I use the main server for Sky & MediaPortal using DVB-S) are pixellated due to some reason. This all worked fine under Essentials. Now, I want to try to completely separate the servers so they appear independent from each other perhaps using a bare-metal Hypervisor, but for this I need PCIe pass through so I can access the tuner cards from a Windows Server Essentials install. Then I can run a server 2012 standard with exchange on another instance connected to the Essentials Domain Controller.

Does VMware/ESXI allow this easily? If not, anyone know of another Hypervisor that can do this?
 
I haven't been able to find this in the documentation, but if you're not running VMWorkstation, is there any point in upgrading the VM to version 10 from version 8?
 
Hi,

I'm running 2 VM labs on 5.1 vSphere (free edition). If I upgrade them to 5.5 do I need to get a licensed version to use the web client?? Is there a way of installing the web client without a vCenter appliance etc??

Ta
 
RimBlock said:
This was my thought as well. Shame but not a show stopper.

RB
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tbz_ck said:
Hi,

I'm running 2 VM labs on 5.1 vSphere (free edition). If I upgrade them to 5.5 do I need to get a licensed version to use the web client?? Is there a way of installing the web client without a vCenter appliance etc??

Ta
Click to expand...
Not that VMware has announced yet. Currently the best bet is to go on a rolling 30 day trial (i.e. rebuild your VCSA every 30 days).
 
I'm trying to set up my ESXI 5 home server and having a bit of trouble.

I have a 1tb drive with my VMs stored on it formatted as a datastore. I also have a 3tb drive formatted to NTFS with a load of stuff on it. I want to pass this drive through to a VM so that it's accessible on the network.

How can I do that? Do I need to reformat it as a datastore disk?
 
Hi Muel,

I've been trying to do the same. From what I can tell, you can only pass through devices to ESXi and therefore the VMs if your motherboard supports either Intel Vt-d or AMD Vi... I've had to purchase a new motherboard so I can natively pass my PCIe devices through.

If your motherboard doesn't support this then I think the only way is to reformat the entire drive as a datastore.

I'm a complete noob to ESXi so if this is incorrect can someone correct me please.

Cheers,

Chris
 
I've been looking into it nearly all day, passing through as a datastore is supposed to work but won't work for me, and I'm not 100% happy doing it that way anyway.

As always I find myself wanting both a file server and an ESXI server.
 
As long as its been formatted as a datastore in ESXi it appears to work fine, I did that and added a 700GB drive to Windows 7 perfectly fine, however it wouldn't accept my 1Tb drive without formatting.

Once my new motherboard arrives, I should be able to pass through the entire SATA interface therefore mounting my drive in windows natively.
 
Doesn't on mine. I believe my hardware doesn't support the pass through stuff that it needs for it to work. As always, ESXi really requires decent hardware, not ancient tat.

I can't decide what to do with it. I think the long and short of it is that for my needs, I really need a microserver set up as a NAS and then a purpose built ESXi server for running vms. I'm just not happy having my shared storage formatted to a datastore.

As an interim measure, I'm thinking of sacking off ESXi for now and setting up what I have with Windows Server 2008 and just running VMWare Player in that for a couple of things.
 
Yeah I know what you mean. I was running Windows Server 2012 with Exchange for personal stuff, but trying to get a modded MediaPortal TV engine running without errors was causing me too much grief and I was constantly formatting, installing etc. My goal with ESXi is to completely eliminate that issue of lugging a monitor to my server every time and do it via the hypervisor.

With the new mobo I can then pass the tv cards, sata devices etc to the VMs natively.
 
Muel said:
I've been looking into it nearly all day, passing through as a datastore is supposed to work but won't work for me, and I'm not 100% happy doing it that way anyway.

As always I find myself wanting both a file server and an ESXI server.
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I suggest you try xpenology I am running it in esxi both on Microserver and on a intel machine i built along with pfsense untangle windows 2008 with 3 usb tv cards and dvb viewer.

With xpenoloy you get all the features of a Synology NAS built in. Great for iscsi and NFS sharing. Also it can saturate GB net even with one reasonable drive. RDM the drives though for best performance.

http://xpenology.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2

Guide to installing

http://xpenology.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2

You mention passing through as a data store. Do you mean RDM Raw Disk Mapping. If so you have to make sure the drive isn't a Data Store in the first place. It has to be a bare drive. Then ssh into the Esxi Machine. Turn that on in the login screen on the actual machine press F2 go to troubleshooting and enable ssh.

Then navigate to cd /vmfs/volumes and then to a data store you wish to store the RDM link file to the drive you wish to mount. So cd /vmfs/volumes/any named datastore/ then a directory say RDM's.

Then you have to find the actual disk you want to mount as a RDM see this guide.

http://vm-help.com/esx40i/SATA_RDMs.php

using the command with -z switch for 2TB drives

vmkfstools -z /vmfs/devices/disks/vml.(this name of the drive you have located) (What ever you want to call the RDM link file).vmdk -a lsilogic

The link file will show on your data store as the same size as your drive don't worry it doesn't take very much space it's just a pointer. Then attach your drive to Esxi as an existing drive to your VM job done.
 
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Just put ESXi 5.5 on my N54L.

Not yet registered a license. I'm looking to make a media box but also have a deep play around with VMware.

- How many VM's am I allowed on the free license?
- I have an N40L also, anything fun I can do if both on ESXi?
- Anyone else run XBMC on, for example, Win 7 on ESXI? Performance OK?

Basically if this were your first VM build what would you do (besides follow the video guides in the first post) to learn Vmware?
 
Vanilla said:
Just put ESXi 5.5 on my N54L.

Not yet registered a license. I'm looking to make a media box but also have a deep play around with VMware.

- How many VM's am I allowed on the free license?
- I have an N40L also, anything fun I can do if both on ESXi?
- Anyone else run XBMC on, for example, Win 7 on ESXI? Performance OK?

Basically if this were your first VM build what would you do (besides follow the video guides in the first post) to learn Vmware?
Click to expand...

Personally On a Microserver 3 vm's I would recommend

pfsense firewall, bridged mode untangle and Synology as described above

The best VM for you would be

With Xpenoloy you have all the packages you get in a normal Synology 4.2 Disk Station Manager. Like Plex media server, TV servers, Download Station, Backup programs. Too many too mention have a look here

http://www.synology.com/dsm/dsm_app.php?lang=us

This could be the best use of a Micro Server either in Esxi with more funtionality or standalone install. Look above in my other post for the links to Xpenoloy forum for more info.

As far as the licencing "how many Vm's" You are not restricted in number of Vm's. The licence restricts hardware such as CPU count and Memory Limit not number of Vm's.
 
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TheBiznes said:
Personally On a Microserver 3 vm's I would recommend

pfsense firewall, bridged mode untangle and Synology as described above

The best VM for you would be

With Xpenoloy you have all the packages you get in a normal Synology 4.2 Disk Station Manager. Like Plex media server, TV servers, Download Station, Backup programs. Too many too mention have a look here

http://www.synology.com/dsm/dsm_app.php?lang=us

This could be the best use of a Micro Server either in Esxi with more funtionality or standalone install. Look above in my other post for the links to Xpenoloy forum for more info.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the input!

pfsense firewall - I don't think this would be much use, the media server isn't really a gateway it's just a box.

I may set up Synology or Xpenoloy rather than freenas.

Plex looks nice but can't help but think XBMC is better!!

maybe Xenology for NAS shares and a simple Win 7 with XBMC :)
 
Are you going to use the Microserver as the player for XBMC? Do you have a graphics card installed? If you are using this as the server Xpenoloy has TV card support that fires into xbmc. There is so many feature of Xpenoloy. I do recommend you take a look. Also with pfsense untangle. I sit behind a router I use pfsense for squid caching (Web Page Caching) and Untangle as it provides added security running level 7 UTM appliance with web Filtering.
 
TheBiznes said:
Are you going to use the Microserver as the player for XBMC? Do you have a graphics card installed? If you are using this as the server Xpenoloy has TV card support that fires into xbmc. There is so many feature of Xpenoloy. I do recommend you take a look. Also with pfsense untangle. I sit behind a router I use pfsense for squid caching (Web Page Caching) and Untangle as it provides added security running level 7 UTM appliance with web Filtering.
Click to expand...

I have an ATI 6450 for graphics as I know the server alone can't cope with HD.

No TV card tho!

Web caching probably not not needed for me, a bit of web browsing, gaming and downloading is all i do!
 
Hi,

Sorry to bother everyone again. So I've got pass through working great, TV card and internal HDDs all connected to Windows (various versions). Now, I want to run Windows 7 to act as my TVServer, Windows Server 2012 Essentials (downgraded standard) as the AD (for dashboard) with MySQL running and then a final copy of windows server 2012 standard for exchange.

It would be useful if all VMs could access the passthorugh HDDs, if this is not possible is there any high speed (i.e. avoiding the main network as I have this running of 1 NIC at present) way of transferring data from VMs?

Thanks,

Chris

Edit: Like an idiot I failed to see the vswitch before the NIC... D'oh!
 
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