Planning a mini-ESXi platform

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Mark

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#97850 21-Feb-2012 11:56

Hi there,

I just need to pick the brains of some of the people here ... someone who knows power supplies and heat dissipation would be good :-)

I want to get up to speed on ESX (work will pay for training and exams but I still need to play to make it sink in) so I'm planning on building a small ESXi v5 system at home, since it's for home and will do other duties as well as be someinthg to learn on I want to keep it physically small, so looking at Mini-ITX.

Hardware wise I'm looking at :

Motherboard : Intel PQ67PE
CPU : Intel i7-2600 (or a Xeon E3-1260L ... if I can find one)
RAM : 2 * 8GB DDR3
HD : Probably a mini-pcie to SDcard adapter with a 16GB SD card, or a 2.5" SATA drive
Other : DVD rom (or maybe Blu-ray writer)
Other : Possibly an extra single/dual-port NIC

So nothing special really, I just made sure the motherboard and CPU both have VT-d enabled is all. Storage for hosts will be provided from my array via iSCSI.

Area I'm fuzzy on is the power supply and the case ...

How big a power supply do I need ?
How much heat is likely to be produced ?
What is a good brand case to go for (I want small, and only need a single PCIe slot, single drive and single CD/DVD slot) ?
Are Mini-ITX power supplies different from ATX ones ?

Been about 5 years since I last built anything from scratch so rather rusty with the new fangled PC bits :-)

Any help much appreciated!

magu

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#584436 21-Feb-2012 11:59

Usually, mini-ITX cases come with PSUs built-in. For power requirements you need to size up all of the components max power draw.

I used this tool to calculate my power requirements: http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp

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Ragnor

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#584530 21-Feb-2012 13:39

Depends on how small you want the case to be, for example the Lian Li has a series of cases for mini ITX that typically fit full sized standard PSU's:
http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/product/product04.php?cl_index=1&sc_index=25&ss_index=64

Mark

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#584568 21-Feb-2012 14:22

Hmmm .. those Lian cases are quite nice, not cheap, but smallish with good capacity. Thanks for the pointer!

Ragnor

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#584571 21-Feb-2012 14:29

Also have a look at Silverstone, good bang for buck as they include a PSU.

SG06 inc 300w PSU ~$200
SG07 inc 600w PSU ~$320

http://www.computerlounge.co.nz/components/componentlist.asp?parttypeid=546&t=5

michaelmurfy

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#584604 21-Feb-2012 15:18

I have ESXi running on a HP Microserver with 8GiB of ram, works well for my needs.

ESXi is installed on a internal 4GiB USB Flash Drive, all 4 HDD bays are filled with 2TiB HDD's

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Mark

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#584716 21-Feb-2012 18:19

michaelmurfy: I have ESXi running on a HP Microserver with 8GiB of ram, works well for my needs.

ESXi is installed on a internal 4GiB USB Flash Drive, all 4 HDD bays are filled with 2TiB HDD's

I'm not a huge fan of HP (having worked for them) but they do make good servers .. and that one is rather good for it's price! :-)

I'll need to check it supports AMD-V (and IOMMU) but I do like on first glance.

Is the SATA controller on it hardware RAID ? So if you create a RAID-5 set out of the drives does ESXi recognize it as one big disk are 4 separate disks ?

Do you know if the CPU is upgradeable ? I see it's a notebook CPU.

Any issues with installing ESXi ?

Thanks!

michaelmurfy

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#584787 21-Feb-2012 20:17

Mark:
michaelmurfy: I have ESXi running on a HP Microserver with 8GiB of ram, works well for my needs.

ESXi is installed on a internal 4GiB USB Flash Drive, all 4 HDD bays are filled with 2TiB HDD's

I'm not a huge fan of HP (having worked for them) but they do make good servers .. and that one is rather good for it's price! :-)

I'll need to check it supports AMD-V (and IOMMU) but I do like on first glance.

Is the SATA controller on it hardware RAID ? So if you create a RAID-5 set out of the drives does ESXi recognize it as one big disk are 4 separate disks ?

Do you know if the CPU is upgradeable ? I see it's a notebook CPU.

Any issues with installing ESXi ?

Thanks!

ESXi seems to be fully supported on it, I am using the internal USB port along with a flash drive. There is "hardware" Raid but it's not very good as the drives ain't hot-swappable, what I do is allocate 4x "drives" to the VM's which are mostly Linux and software raid them.

The CPU is fine for most tasks, my Microserver is running 6 VM's at the moment with no sweat assuming that the VM's don't require a huge amount of CPU time.

ESXi just installed - no issues there :) the Microserver supports AMD-V but not IOMMU by the looks of things, except I might be wrong with this.

All up though - it's a well built server, quiet and seems pretty good for your needs.

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davidcole

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#584803 21-Feb-2012 20:46

Wont the mini itx boards have issues with the esxi drivers? I originally planned an esx system with my nforce chipset motherboard, but it wouldn't recognise the nic, so I went Windows Home server 2011 with vmware server.

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Mark

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#584902 22-Feb-2012 00:24

michaelmurfy:

ESXi seems to be fully supported on it, I am using the internal USB port along with a flash drive. There is "hardware" Raid but it's not very good as the drives ain't hot-swappable, what I do is allocate 4x "drives" to the VM's which are mostly Linux and software raid them.

The CPU is fine for most tasks, my Microserver is running 6 VM's at the moment with no sweat assuming that the VM's don't require a huge amount of CPU time.

ESXi just installed - no issues there :) the Microserver supports AMD-V but not IOMMU by the looks of things, except I might be wrong with this.

All up though - it's a well built server, quiet and seems pretty good for your needs.

I'll see if I can find a partner to lend me one to have a play with :-) Thanks for the info!

Mark

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#584904 22-Feb-2012 00:26

davidcole: Wont the mini itx boards have issues with the esxi drivers? I originally planned an esx system with my nforce chipset motherboard, but it wouldn't recognise the nic, so I went Windows Home server 2011 with vmware server.

This board I've checked out it, most of what I require will with a plain ESXi install CD I might only have to add the Intel/Broadcom drivers to the image, all the stuff like USB 3.0, sound etc I've no real use for but if I did I'd pass them through to a guest via VT-d :-)

gjm

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#584941 22-Feb-2012 08:30

biggest problem I have with my VM environment at home is disk speed. CPU / RAM use seldom goes high but disk gets hammered especially if you are doing something like Windows patching. I only have normal internal drives (1 x 1 TB and 2 x 500gig) and am seriously considering getting a seperate NAS that supports iscsi and RAID 10. That way I can play with datastores as well. May be worth thinking about for your build. Alternatively just slap a ssd in there :)

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Mark

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#584970 22-Feb-2012 09:28

gjm: biggest problem I have with my VM environment at home is disk speed. CPU / RAM use seldom goes high but disk gets hammered especially if you are doing something like Windows patching. I only have normal internal drives (1 x 1 TB and 2 x 500gig) and am seriously considering getting a seperate NAS that supports iscsi and RAID 10. That way I can play with datastores as well. May be worth thinking about for your build. Alternatively just slap a ssd in there :)

Already covered off :-) Got a NAS (4 * 2TB in RAID5) that supports iSCSI with 2 * GigE interfaces LACP'd up to a managed switch, SSD would be a waste for me just learning ... might get one if I ever need a high performing guest, but the iSCSI speeds should be about 150-180MB/s.

gjm

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#584974 22-Feb-2012 09:29

jealous much :(

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Mark

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#585002 22-Feb-2012 10:06

Hehe ... go get a NAS! Does make life much nicer when you have a decent home network to have all your files accessible. Pays to do homework on them though some are better than others for certain tasks.