DIY VMware ESXi Server

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Sn00zE

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Hi guys..
Need some advice with hardware for my personal VMWare server..
Budget needs to be as low as possible with best parts to use..

For hardware i have the following:
Reviewed list of hardware!

SuperMicro X7DBI+
2x Intel Xeon X5460
16GB RAM or 32GB RAM
LSI MR 300 raid controller OR similar
8x 2TB (Brand not decided because of pricing) (Raided)

Old List of hardware..
AMD FX-8120 Octo-Core 3.1GHz AM3+ processor
Asus M5A88-M EVO AM3+ Motherboard
16GB Ram (Brand undecided)
SYBA SY-PEX40008 PCI Express SATA II (3.0Gb/s) Software RAID Controller Card
Port Multiplier CFI-B53PM 5 Port Backplane
2x xxGB hard drives for vSphere (Raided)(HDD/SSD)
10x 2TB (Brand not decided because of pricing) (Raided)
Low Profile Dual Port Gigabit Network Server Adapter NIC Card

Custom case will sport a Dual Power supply setup. << Still thinking about this! Want to make it custom with watercooling and lights! =D hehehe

My question is would this hardware be suffice to run at least 3 VM's..
1) Web Server
2) Media Server (for managing files and streaming to cubox)
3) All round backup and download server

Reason i'm looking at AMD rather than Intel is pricing.. Will this impact performance much seeing that i can get double the cores for half the price! Keep in mind this is not a build to do number crunching and video editing, its purely for the three vm's mentioned above..

Any advice or recommendations?
 
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Crap dude, that's like two core per VM with 4GB ram each. I reckon it's plenty but then again I'm no virtualisation expert.
 
Should be sufficient - we are running a similar setup with 4 VM's inside a Dual Xeon X2650, 16GB RAM, 4x1Tb HDD in RAID-0

Main thing is as ponder stated, the 2 cores per VM might be pushing it .. but all in all should be fine
 
I have been doing some more research and questioning and have decided to settle for a dual cpu setup with something like the follow kit SuperMicro X7DBI+ , 2x Intel Xeon X5460, 16GB Mem and mybe a LSI MR 300 raid controller with a proper U1 or U2 server case.. =) Still ogling all the hardware i need! :p
 
Its important to double (triple?) check the compatibility of ESXi with any NICs and RAID controllers.

I would hesitate to ratify your system specifications without knowledge of whether this is a production, test or dev box (or, perhaps, all 3).

Further, ensure that the motherboard/CPU allows hardware passthrough.
 
From my experience memory and HDD space is more important than the amount of CPU power on a VM host.
We have 7 ESXi hosts, they have 96GB memory each, and two X5660 CPU's in each, all connected to the same SAN.
Now the only thing that never goes over 15% utilization is the CPU on the hosts. The only host that reaches 15% CPU usage is the host that has our two Exchange servers on and two SQL servers on, plus a few lower spec servers, all together using 70% of the 96GB memory... but still CPU never gone over 15%

I would rather get more memory than spending big on CPU's.

My workstation is a IBM x3400 server (supports 2 cpu's but only have one Xeon E5520 in currently) and has 24GB memory in. Installed Win 7 64 bit, and have VMWare workstation installed on it, I use it for testing, and have no problems with CPU utilization when I power on 5 VM's with 4GB memory each, I just wish I had more memory in it... and more HDD's for space...
I have a box next to me with 32 x 4GB ECC DDR3 1333 memory modules (replaced 48 4GB modules with 8GB modules the other day in some servers), but I have no server/pc to put it in! Just need another CPU for my workstation before I can use the other 6 memory slots!

Then I also have another IBM x3400 with a lower spec Xeon quad core cpu, no hyperthreading, so only 4 logical procs in ESXi, with 24GB memory. Running on that is a 2008 R2 server with Spiceworks on, then our IT office linux media server, and a few test win 7 pc's that the desktop support guys use... no problems with that one's CPU usage either....

I see you mentioned installing ESXi on 2 drives, RAIDED, 0 or 1? Want speed or protection?
Our production servers all have ESXi 5 (upgraded to version 5 a month ago) installed on an internal memory stick.... not even using the two internal 10 000 rpm SAS drives for the esxi install... was recommended by IBM to use the USB stick.... wonder why cause it does boot up a bit slower that the test esxi box with esxi it installed on 3 x 10 000rpm SAS drives in RAID 5...
 
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yeti said:
Its important to double (triple?) check the compatibility of ESXi with any NICs and RAID controllers.

I would hesitate to ratify your system specifications without knowledge of whether this is a production, test or dev box (or, perhaps, all 3).

Further, ensure that the motherboard/CPU allows hardware passthrough.
Click to expand...
Most of the parts im looking at now has been recommended for ESXi. The parts in the first post is now not valid anymore.. I did mention in the first post what i want to use my server for.. Its purely for home use and learning! Main thing i want is redundancy for my drives(Raid) and network streaming performance! Network is Gigabit..


ShawnStar said:
From my experience memory and HDD space is more important than the amount of CPU power on a VM host.
We have 7 ESXi hosts, they have 96GB memory each, and two X5660 CPU's in each, all connected to the same SAN.
Now the only thing that never goes over 15% utilization is the CPU on the hosts. The only host that reaches 15% CPU usage is the host that has our two Exchange servers on and two SQL servers on, plus a few lower spec servers, all together using 70% of the 96GB memory... but still CPU never gone over 15%

I would rather get more memory than spending big on CPU's.

My workstation is a IBM x3400 server (supports 2 cpu's but only have one Xeon E5520 in currently) and has 24GB memory in. Installed Win 7 64 bit, and have VMWare workstation installed on it, I use it for testing, and have no problems with CPU utilization when I power on 5 VM's with 4GB memory each, I just wish I had more memory in it... and more HDD's for space...
I have a box next to me with 32 x 4GB ECC DDR3 1333 memory modules (replaced 48 4GB modules with 8GB modules the other day in some servers), but I have no server/pc to put it in! Just need another CPU for my workstation before I can use the other 6 memory slots!

Then I also have another IBM x3400 with a lower spec Xeon quad core cpu, no hyperthreading, so only 4 logical procs in ESXi, with 24GB memory. Running on that is a 2008 R2 server with Spiceworks on, then our IT office linux media server, and a few test win 7 pc's that the desktop support guys use... no problems with that one's CPU usage either....

I see you mentioned installing ESXi on 2 drives, RAIDED, 0 or 1? Want speed or protection?
Our production servers all have ESXi 5 (upgraded to version 5 a month ago) installed on an internal memory stick.... not even using the two internal 10 000 rpm SAS drives for the esxi install... was recommended by IBM to use the USB stick.... wonder why cause it does boot up a bit slower that the test esxi box with esxi it installed on 3 x 10 000rpm SAS drives in RAID 5...
Click to expand...

I will be adding about 8*2TB drives.. Wont be needing more that that for now.. :) Ram.. I can always add more ram if needed! 4GB per vm should be enough i guess! But seeing that you have more experience in this field it seems i would take your opinion in consideration and see if i could salvage some 32GB ram. :D Never a bad thing to have too much! :D Don't think i will need 60+GB ram! hahaha

Core's i will need.. That is why i'm going for two cpu's rather than one.. =)

Ohh thanks for the info on ESXi on usb! Looking into that now! There is some saving on extra drives! =) As long as it doesn't have too much of a performance hit when running.. Booting time is not a issue..

One other question is POWER.. What is the minimum UPS needed to run a standalone server? Any specific power requirements? I know it will have a larger load than normal but i don't want to have to build nuclear reactor at home just to power that damn thing.. Wall plug must do!!! Eskum come knocking! XD hahaha
 
You don't need a UPS to run a server, only if you don't want it to go down if there's a power failure. It is always better to have a UPS of course. Power failures and power spikes can screw up a lot of things in a pc/server..
You can just plug it into a normal power socket at your house.... or get a cheapo 1KVA ups and plug it into that...
 
FYI

I run a HP N36L MicroServer at home that runs ESXi, houses several VMs, FreeNAS / Ubuntu Server (download/web server) / Win8 (for dev) / Debian Mint (dev).

I'm not doing any heavy lifting with it, but its shows how little hardware (read: minimum cost) you need in terms of home use.
 
Yeti,

Do you reckon the newer microserver wth a gt210 could run VMs housing Ubuntu server hosting a dchub with about 20 clients, downloading with utorrent, host a small WUG website, some form of xbmc playing 1080p video, Freenas. For home use.

DanKM
 
DanH said:
Yeti,

Do you reckon the newer microserver wth a gt210 could run VMs housing Ubuntu server hosting a dchub with about 20 clients, downloading with utorrent, host a small WUG website, some form of xbmc playing 1080p video, Freenas. For home use.

DanKM
Click to expand...

You will not be able to use XBMC in this manner. You will need a second computer to run XBMC and stream videos from your ESXi host. However, the remainder of your requirements would most certainly be satisfied with a N36L / N40L - if you can still find one.

It is critical to note that because the HP N36L (and I am assuming the N40L) do not support hardware passthrough, your HDDs used by FreeNAS will not be portable (they will consist of .vmdk files in ZFS format). If hardware passthrough were supported, you could easily attach ext / ntfs drives directly into your VMs, giving you the ability to add/remove drives as necessary. This is a significant caveat.

For interest sake, I have 2 HP N36Ls, one consists of all my VMs, 10.32TB, 8 GB Non-ECC memory, ESXi on flash, and the other is vanilla with a Sapphire HD5450 LP and XBMC running off a flash.
 
Just be warned ESXi 5 is limited to 8GB of RAM on the host
 
ShawnStar said:
From my experience memory and HDD space is more important than the amount of CPU power on a VM host.
We have 7 ESXi hosts, they have 96GB memory each, and two X5660 CPU's in each, all connected to the same SAN.
Now the only thing that never goes over 15% utilization is the CPU on the hosts. The only host that reaches 15% CPU usage is the host that has our two Exchange servers on and two SQL servers on, plus a few lower spec servers, all together using 70% of the 96GB memory... but still CPU never gone over 15%

I would rather get more memory than spending big on CPU's.

My workstation is a IBM x3400 server (supports 2 cpu's but only have one Xeon E5520 in currently) and has 24GB memory in. Installed Win 7 64 bit, and have VMWare workstation installed on it, I use it for testing, and have no problems with CPU utilization when I power on 5 VM's with 4GB memory each, I just wish I had more memory in it... and more HDD's for space...
I have a box next to me with 32 x 4GB ECC DDR3 1333 memory modules (replaced 48 4GB modules with 8GB modules the other day in some servers), but I have no server/pc to put it in! Just need another CPU for my workstation before I can use the other 6 memory slots!

Then I also have another IBM x3400 with a lower spec Xeon quad core cpu, no hyperthreading, so only 4 logical procs in ESXi, with 24GB memory. Running on that is a 2008 R2 server with Spiceworks on, then our IT office linux media server, and a few test win 7 pc's that the desktop support guys use... no problems with that one's CPU usage either....

I see you mentioned installing ESXi on 2 drives, RAIDED, 0 or 1? Want speed or protection?
Our production servers all have ESXi 5 (upgraded to version 5 a month ago) installed on an internal memory stick.... not even using the two internal 10 000 rpm SAS drives for the esxi install... was recommended by IBM to use the USB stick.... wonder why cause it does boot up a bit slower that the test esxi box with esxi it installed on 3 x 10 000rpm SAS drives in RAID 5...
Click to expand...

ESXI or ESX?
 
nivek said:
Just be warned ESXi 5 is limited to 8GB of RAM on the host
Click to expand...

That's a limit of the MicroServer, not ESXI 5
(Don't have one but read on HP's site the server only supports up to 8 GB memory, or else I would have bought a few long ago!)
Think the actual limit might be 32GB RAM for ESXi 5 on a host with a single CPU socket, or that's what my ESXi 5 test host's licensing features say at least, got 24GB memory in that one)
 
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ShawnStar said:
That's a limit of the MicroServer, not ESXI 5
(Don't have one but read on HP's site the server only supports up to 8 GB memory, or else I would have bought a few long ago!)
Think the actual limit might be 32GB RAM for ESXi 5 on a host with a single CPU socket, or that's what my ESXi 5 test host's licensing features say at least, got 24GB memory in that one)
Click to expand...
yep
32GB it is from what I can see as well, alot of places saying 8GB though
 
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