The (un)Official VMWare ESXi thread.

I want to be able to go down the shared storage route, again it will be governed by cost...damn you mortgage.

Can I simply buy a NAS, add some hard disks and use that? What problems am I likely to come across?


shahpor said:
Also, what OS do you run in the VM's? Does it have to be Windows Server, or will 7 or XP run on it as well?

Thanks.
Click to expand...

xp, vista and win7 are fine.
 
I've installed esxi 5 on an old dell 860 and the vSphere client on my main PC. I can connect fine and setup VMs etc. Today I installed the vSphere client on my iPad but I can't get it to connect, tried IP and host name but always get a http error.
any ideas where I'm going wrong?
 
http://www.sohon.co.uk

Some more guides I made here ^


pdw8 said:
I've installed esxi 5 on an old dell 860 and the vSphere client on my main PC. I can connect fine and setup VMs etc. Today I installed the vSphere client on my iPad but I can't get it to connect, tried IP and host name but always get a http error.
any ideas where I'm going wrong?
Click to expand...


Make sure you are on the same network
 
I have to say I'm totally blown away with this software (and vm in general.) Ive installed EXSi on my server and use my main PC as the client. Ive install Ubuntu so far and going to try to get iOS on another vm soon. I can even use my ipad to configure the server and vms.
 
I've got a poweredge 2950 gen 2 or 3 can't quite remember at work running esxi5 no probs, had to use the dell esxi iso file for the broadcom nics.

And my own home server is a dell Poweredge r710, 6x 300gb 15k sas drives, 24gb ram, 2x quad core xeons. Got it for a bargain price of the bay, and it's running 18 vm's no probs, granted they're not being hammered but it works, using it to try and get MDT 2012 to pick computer name up from it's internal database which is rather awkward as it just doesn't seem to work!!
 
Bringing this thread back from the depths.

vSphere 5.1 is due out 11th September.

It has a number of interesting features like;
No vRam tax - Versions priced by socket only with no individual vRam version specific restrictions.
New SSD Monitoring – New “smartd” module provides Wear Leveling and other SMART details for SAS and SATA SSD.
Enhanced iSCSI support – Jumbo frames supported on all iSCSI adapters with full UI support.
Improved vSphere Distributed Switch – Greater scalability and more efficient administration with configuration rollback, configuration backup and restore, and enhanced network traffic monitoring.
Improved Graphics for Desktop VMs – Run hardware intensive 3D graphics applications on Desktop VMs with Virtual Shared Accelerated Graphics, now supporting the acceleration of VDI workloads using physical GPU resources. With this new capability it is now possible to virtualize physical GPU resources, sharing them across virtual desktops.
Official LACP support (for network link bonding).

List of vSphere 5.1 new features here.

Article on The Register here.

RB
 
Oooh can't wait to try the LACP support out, and see if it makes a difference.

My current esxi box isn't doing very much, just hosting a linux webserver I use. Not stressed at all, but am looking at getting it setup and maybe using something like freenas to setup an iscsi target for vmotion.
 
After a quick download and upgrade I have to say the resulting server was not as I had hoped. There were a number of issues and I decided to to a complete new install. To be fair, a fresh install is the default option.

I have a 4 port Intel ET network card and a HP 1810-24G switch and setting up the LACP was very easy and seems to be working fine. I have not load tested to confirm speeds but all 4 light are flashing on the switch.

Upgrade of the VMware tools was same as usual for Linux and Windows. My CentOS installs went smoothly but my WHS-2011 install does not seem to like the VMXNET3 adaptor. Changing it back to a ET1000 sorted any issues out. I will have to dig a bit deeper in to that one.

Copying a 1.5GB test file hit transferred between 109MB/s and 122MB/s from my PC (Hitachi HDD, Broadcom Netlink (TM) integrated network, Win 7 64bit) to my server on the 4x1GbE trunk (Intel Quad ET, Stablebit Drivepool storage, WHS 2011).

The vSphere client feels a fair bit faster. A few extra storage metrics predefined.

Only a very quick install and browse so I am sure more info will come to light as more people get their hands on it and I have a bit more of a play around.

RB
 
I was planning on the upgrade later. You think I should avoid this then? Pretty surprised the upgrade isn't available as a patch.
 
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