Comments on: How to build a Quad-Core Xeon VMware ESXi Server for less than an ‘82 Civic!

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 01:47:14 +0000

I forgot to mention one critical thing – definitely do not use multiple virtual processors for your win 2003 vm’s. you will get crap performance. And if you ‘upgrade’ to multiple in the vm settings it wont’ matter if you switch it back to 1 either. I don’t know how to disable HT in bios but that doesn’t seem to matter. you can leave it on in both the bios and for the ESX settings without incident if you stick with one vproc per vm.

and I had 3 win2003 vm’s going concurrent without any impact.

By: Dave

Dave — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 01:42:07 +0000

So a followup post to this. I actually did get everything working. And with the adaptec 5404 the PE1800 screams. I was seeing 1.3GB/s (that’s bytes) burst rates with a bare metal install of Server 2003 and HD Tune and HD Tach. With ESX 4.0 definitely took a hit though. sustained reads are consistently around 500MB/s with 3 drives. not too shabby. If only Adaptec had management CIMS for ESXi 4 or if ESXi 4 supported SNMP that would be even better.

Also, I used the latest Dell optimized ESXi from the vmware.com site. The image posted on dell.com is pretty old.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 06:33:20 +0000

@servermatt – I am planning to install your exact configuration tomorrow so I will let you know how it goes. I just popped in a brand new Adaptec 5404 RAID controller with 3 – 1TB SATA drives. If you are using the included CERC SATA RAID 1.5/6ch controller in yours – do yourself a favor: throw it away immediately! it is crap. The 5404 even recognizes my arrays from the CERC which is interesting.

i know about the VT issue which is why I can’t run XEN or the windows hypervisor so this is my last attempt. i’ll keep you posted.

By: ServerMatt

ServerMatt — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 21:16:19 +0000

Question shooting off of Zoobie earlier talking about getting ESXi 4 to work on a Dell PowerEdge 1800. I find this after I just shot from the hip and tried to install ESXi 4 and then a VM (WIN2k3r2). It all seemed to work fine until i was updating the 2k3 VM…vi client locked up, nothing would work, restarted the client a couple times, and it took forever to log in, then when i did the entire datastore appeared to be gone. I hadn’t yet put VMtools on the VM yet, but the server behaved wildly outside any of my VM peers ever saw. Poked the box in the eye a couple times thinking it just got hung up, the vi client would again login very slow then find an empty datastore.

Attempt 2, popped in the ESXi 4 installer disc again, ran through it all and it seemed fine. Got the vi client up, uploaded my 2k3 iso’s for round 2 at getting the VM up, then out of nowhere the previous VM appeared in the datastore????(yes from before i reinstalled the ESXi 4 hypervisor for the 2nd time)

Now looking i see the PE1800 server is not supported, i see Zoobie above talking about a bios update that I can’t find on Dell’s site, and another listing saying it will work if you turn on Hardware Virtualization (which is not in the A06 bios).

Did Zoobie or anyone else ever get ESXi 4 working on a Dell PE1800 and if so how?

This is just for testing, but like Zoobie i’m playing musical servers and don’t have anywhere to test ESXi 4 at the moment otherwise. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

By: EvilEmuofDoom

EvilEmuofDoom — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 20:46:15 +0000

Sorry for the long absence all… it’s been a lot of long hours and long weeks.

At this point the 860 is probably an aging option even though it’s only been a year. I’ll keep my eye out for other great budget ESXi options.

For those with the T110’s. Have you had any problems with them? I’ve run into some strange network issues with VM’s running on a T105 and T110 at a small client site (using on-board NIC only). No packets to the host are dropped but pinging the VM’s causes and occasional 20-30 second connection loss.

I’ve also recently built 2 Hyper-V R2 servers for a client of ours who is a MS Gold Partner (they have tons of free MS licensing and don’t want to pay for vmware). So I might have some good info about that experience coming up soon.

In other news, I finally got around to testing and acquiring my VCP4 certification (yay!)

By: GBCrawford

GBCrawford — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 05:35:03 +0000

BTW

Broadcom 5709 and 5722 difference?
5709 = dual head (2 x 1GB Ethernet ports per card) $149 ea. @ Dell
5722 = single head $89 ea. @ Dell

By: GBCrawford

GBCrawford — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 05:32:14 +0000

RE: iq100 “I bought a Dell T110, partly based in what I read here. … ”

THANK YOU! – I barely noticed the lack of the dual gigabit, ASK AND YOU SHALL RECEIVE, because they haven’t offered this to me after the fact! I will call them on this and request one too. IS THERE AN OPTION OF THE TWO (5722 & 5709) YOU MENTIONED?

Initially, I would opt for a dual head controller to net 3 interfaces, this provides a more efficient use of resources. I am not in a production environment, just R&D for learning and development course development, as I am an IT Instructor and trainer for the last 10 years (IT for 23 yr).

It did surprise me to see 2 internal USB ports, I thought Dell mentioned only one internally. That was useful.

I still need a solution for ESXi installable for the file system compatibility limitations. I have plenty of SCSI drives, (well, SATA drives too) yet no SCSI controller. Yeah, Craigslist for $20 – $50, but budget is gone.

NOTE:
* IDE RAID and SATA RAID are not supported for the VMFS file system.
and . . .
* ESX 4.0, ESXi 4.0 Embedded and ESXi 4.0 Installable are equivalent products from an I/O device compatibility perspective. (per VMware’s website)

These are two facts that are commonly overlooked. VMFS (Virtual Machine File System) is a cluster file system. Used by ESX Server and VMware Infrastructure (VI). It’s used to store virtual machine disk images. It is not mandatory to use VMFS with VMware; an alternative is NFS.

Thanks for the TIP iq100!

* * Great Forum, I hope to contribute more, if encouraged to do so? * *

By: CAN79

CAN79 — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 14:39:51 +0000

on perc 5/i vt-d is not supported.
if you vt-d enable on bios you can’t add datastore on vmware 4.x

By: iq100

iq100 — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 14:14:01 +0000

I bought a Dell T110, patly based on what I read here.
Question: Is there a major difference between the capabilities of the Broadcom 5709 and 5722?
Dell offered a free 5722 to make up for the lack of the advertrised dual gigabit newtwork capability.
Is it worth ttying to get the 5709 instead or are these differences really unimportant to most everyday uses.
A case in point would be an application server ,run as an ASP connectiion to many users over the Internet.
Any guesses on the relative connections a 5709 could handle versus a 5722, assuming that only the NIC is the bottleneck? It may be that the 5709 was motivated to help less capable processors than a X3440, and that it is virually impossible to saturate a X3440 with Tcp/IP chores?? Can anyone point to synhetic number of packets/response time tests using a X3440 and Broadcom 5709 versus 5722?
Thanks!

By: Jon Burgstrom

Jon Burgstrom — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:08:17 +0000

Hi,

Thanks for the replies. Let me get some advice from you as a follow up. Knowing the limited space of the 1U case and that I am already running a SAS 5/ir card, what would you recommend then?

1. DRAC remote management card.
2. Dual 1Gb Ethernet card.

Thanks in advance.