Lenovo Storage S3. Simple Setup. Slideshare uses cookies to improve functionality and performance, and to provide you with relevant advertising. If you continue browsing the site, you agree to the use of cookies on this website. See our User Agreement and Privacy Policy. If you continue browsing the site, you agree to the use of cookies on this website. See our Privacy Policy and User Agreement for details. Painel frontal de montagem (Carbon Black) - Altura de 5U para a s. Intel E10G41AT2 10 Gigabit AT2 Server Adapter. Disco SAS 300GB 15K LFF 6G p/ Storage P2000.
Building a Low Cost (Cheap) VMWare ESX Test Server. My job now involves more and more virtualised (or virtualized if you’re one of our American cousins from across the pond) server implementations so this is a good excuse to go and build my own VMware ESX test environment. I have been reading many articles over the last few months such as those by vinf. Ryan Coates who have blogged about their experiences building their own VMware ESX test rig. As most of you probably know much of issues faced by those wanting to build their own cheap ESX test server is having SCSI disk on which to present the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS). There are a handful, and more with ESX v. SATA disk controllers that present the disks to ESX as being SCSI. Performance modifications for 1gig and 10gig networks. The default install of FreeBSD and PC-BSD is quite fast and will work well the majority of the time. If you installed either FreeBSD or PC-BSD without any modifications. Obviously due to the cost of SATA Vs SCSI/SAS disks this is preferable for a low cost ESX box. I was wanting a server that would offer half decent performance and wasn’t going to cost the earth. Probably the cheapest, and one of the most hassle free ways would be to purchase an HP Compaq D5. A basic model can be picked up on EBay from about . Although this would be fine for any low/moderate resource intensive VM’s I was hoping for something which would give me that added flexibility of a little more horse- power under the hood, especially in the area of disk access speeds. I have an existing homemade desktop machine which has an AMD X2 4. CPU, 4. GB memory and onboard RAID 0 SATA II 3. GB hard disks which runs very well. All I would have to have added to this PC is an ESX compatible SATA controller such as the LSI Mega. Raid 1. 50 and a compatible network adapter. The LSI Mega. Raid 1. PCI adapter and as such I would have lost valuable bandwidth as my ABit motherboard only had 3. PCI slots available. So to get the most out of the disk controller I would have had to have purchased a new motherboard and in using my existing PC as a dedicated ESX test rig I would be down one PC that I use for all my day to day computing bits and pieces. After much more trawling of VM forums regarding ESX white boxes I decided to take the plunge and go for an entry level HP server with an entry level ESX certified disk controller. As budget is an issue the HP Proliant ML1. Intel) or HP ML1. AMD) seemed like an obvious choice. I have worked with HP Proliants for a number of years now and have always been impressed with their build quality and reliability even on low end models. Both the ML1. 10 and ML1. SATA raid though there wasn’t any clear definitive information on whether the controller would allow the SATA disks to be seen as SCSI based by ESX – as is necessary for the VMFS volume. This wasn’t to be an issue however as I had also decided to buy and install an HP Smart Array e. Controller. This controller can control both SATA and SAS drives so offered some future proofing for when SAS drives become more affordable and mainstream in the home market. Unfortunately the e. SATA I (1. 5. Gb/s) speeds though hopefully by using 2 disks in a RAID 0 (Ok, I know where’s the redundancy? An HP specific 4 port SATA cable is also needed (HP PN: 4. UPDATE: I have posted another article that outlines things to look out for when going to buy an HP Proliant ML1. G4 to run ESX. The cheapest (UK based) online vendor I found to buy an ML1. They, apparently have bought up all of HP’s remaining ML1. G4 models (G5 is the latest) from HP so are now selling them off at a reduced price (ie: . Graphics Controller – – 2 MB Networking – Network adapter – PCI Express – Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, Gigabit Ethernet Power – AC 1. V ( 5. 0/6. 0 Hz ) Manufacturer Warranty – 3 year warranty ( on- site )As you can see the server is capable of taking 8. GB of memory which should be enough for most self respecting ESX test servers, though as standard it only comes with 5. MB. I have used 4 x 1. GB Corsair XMS2 Extreme memory modules – which I took out of my other server. If I didn’t have this memory spare I was going to buy memory from crucial where you can buy 2 x 2. GB modules for . This would leave 2 spare memory slots for adding extra memory in the future. I find that Crucial memory is usually the best bet for such non- business critical server installations. Although genuine HP memory would have been nice the usual story applies where it costs at least twice as much for just being a . Using HP genuine memory is important from a HP support perspective in business critical or clients servers. I also purchased (. Here is the specification: HP Smart Array E2. BBWC Controller – storage controller (RAID) – SATA- 1. SAS – PCI Express x. Device Type – Storage controller (RAID) – plug- in card Interface Type – PCI Express x. Dimensions (Wx. Dx. H) – 1. 5 cm x 3. Controller Interface Type – Serial ATA- 1. SAS Data Transfer Rate – 3. MBps Buffer Size – 1. MB Supported Devices – Disk array (RAID) Max Storage Devices Qty – 8 RAID Level – RAID 0, RAID 5, RAID 1. The Big Day. After a lot of hassle with the courier delivering the kit it eventually turned up – happy days. Smaller in fact than my current PC’s midi- tower case. This is good news as I have limited space in my inner- city London flat. I set about installing 2 Samsung Spin. Point 3. 20. GB hard disks – to be used in a RAID 0 configuration off of the e. My plan with the hard disks is to run ESX off of the SATA hard disk that came with the server (1. GB) which runs off of the motherboards SATA controller and then create the VMFS volumes on the raided 3. GB drives which are connected to the e. The HP Smart Array e. MB of Battery Backed Write Cache. Here is the necessary HP SAS/SATA cable that connects the hard disks to the e. Unfortunately standard SATA cables won’t work. Most of the suppliers I contacted always seemed to be out of stock. Once I had added the memory it was time to start it up and install ESX v. Another item of note with the ML1. It is perfectly quiet enough to have this server running in a room without really knowing it’s actually switched on. I wouldn’t say it’s completely silent but it is no louder than your average PC. Installing VMware ESX v. It picked up all the hardware devices first time (ie: disk controllers, NIC, etc). Before I knew it I had a working ESX installation which I could connect to via the VMware Infrastructure Manager which is running on my PC. One interesting point of note is that ESX see’s the hard disk connected to the onboard SATA controller as a SCSI VMFS3 device so I could have saved some money and run my ESX install and the VM images off of the onboard SATA controller. I have created a VM instance on the disk connected to the onboard controller and can confirm it works just fine. Though, as with the D5. VM instances depending on what these instances are doing (ie: a task that involves moderate or high disk IO) I could foresee disk access being a potential bottle neck and a separate disk controller preferable. That said, as this is just a ESX test server then in most cases the VM instances will most likely not be doing anything too resource intensive. So all up this is what creating my VMware ESX v. HP ML1. 10 G4 . Please leave any comments or questions. UPDATE: Check out my blog article here on installing VMware ESX 3i 3. ML1. 10 G5. UPDATE: I have had a number of queries regarding the NIC and the onboard disk controller running with ESX. Here is a link to my temporary blog posting – whilst I compile this information.
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