SD VMUG July 10th presentation - Running ESX on the cheap

Lawrence — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:35:05 GMT

Running VMware ESX 3.x on the cheap

San Diego VMUG

Lawrence Dee

Systems Engineer - Cardinal Health

Consultant - North County Computer Consulting

July 10, 2008

bq. for lab/testing/training/demo purposes

Challenge is ESX will install on IDE/ATA, but VMFS storage requires SCSI

Therefore, 2 primary inexpensive options:

Links on White-box setups

Or, run ESX 3.x under Workstation 6.x!

Running ESX v3.0.x under Workstation v6.0.x http://www.xtravirt.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=99&Itemid=124
- Guide to installing VMware ESX3 on Workstation 6
- Guide to installing VMware ESX3 on Workstation 6 - Part 2 IET Virtual Shared Storage
- Guide to installing VMware ESX3 on Workstation 6 - Part 3 OpenFiler VIrtual Shared Storage
- Commentary on VMware ESX3.5 on Workstation 6.0
  - Basically talks about the need for a newer revision of AMD Virtualization (AMD-V ‘Pacifica') / Intel Virtualization Technology (VT) found in Intel Quad-Core CPUs (and I believe 3rd generation AMD chips (Phenom)
Desktop CPUs
- http://www.intel.com/products/processor_number/chart/core2quad.htm
  - Most, but not all, Intel CPUs T5600 or higher have VT
- http://products.amd.com/en-us/DesktopCPUResult.aspx
- http://products.amd.com/en-us/NotebookCPUResult.aspx
- Note: Server/workstation CPUs
  - Looks like AMD quad-core Barcelona based Opterons share 10h architecture with Phenoms, so should also work •Xeons released mid-2007 should also work
VMware Workstation v6.5 beta 2
- Originally removed support for some Intel virtualization handling (‘too bloated / cumbersome") to support ESX v3.5 but based on community feedback was added back to v6.5. AMD support was always present

Dell Latitude D820 T7200 (Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz VT enabled, 64-bit capable) 2GB RAM
- External Raptor 10k RPM SATA drive for VMs
- Host OS - was running Vista Ultimate x32 SP1, but needed more ram, so dropped host OS to - XP Pro x86/32 SP3
- VMware Workstation 6.5b2 (build 99530)
5 VMs (currently) built initially based up XtraVirt.com's ESX 3.0.x under WS6.0.x
- Fedora 7 running OpenFiler / IET 0.4.15 (256MB RAM, 1 vCPU)
  - 40GB vmdk, 30+GB for iSCSI storage
- ESX#1 v3.5 Update 1 Build 82663 (768 MB RAM 1 vCPU)
  - IDE local, SCSI for local VMFS
  - VMkernel set for same NAT'ed network as Service Console
- ESX#2 v3.5 Update 1 (768 MB RAM 1 vCPU)
  - IDE only
- Virtual Center 2.5 update 1 (892MB RAM 1 vCPU XP Pro SP2)
- ESX#3 v3.0.2 Update 1 (768 MB RAM 1 vCPU)
  - IDE system drive, SCSI for local VMFS

Virtual Center
- RAM - finally upped RAM to 768+MB and that seems to have really helped
- CPU usage - Maxing out 1 CPU, tried 2 and squeezes out other VMs so went back to 1 vCPU for VC
- Followed VMware kb article to stop statistic collection (not sure that helped - seems to have)
- not uncommon for vpxclient to crash in VirtualCenter VM (most likely CPU starved?)
ESX couldn't see iSCSI storage in my setup (most likely user error?) though MS initiator can
Switched from logging using VC client to log into Virtual Center and log direct into ESX server - seems to work better at the moment
- ESX using 400MB of RAM sitting there, so upped ESX VM from 512 to 768 MB of RAM
I've adjusted the VIC timeout from 30 seconds to 60 seconds
Running XP's Task Mgr in Virtual Center VM drives CPU to 100% with Task Mgr taking 50%???
- I do have WS 6.0.3? VM Tools installed rather than WS6.5b2's VMtools (read of blue screen with latest VM tools).
Bottom line
- I was unable to build a Win XP or 2003 VM under ESX under WS6.5b2 (couldn't see disk drive??)
- I was able to get a VM running (Bart PE booting off ISO file)

Future plans

* Switch from using ESX 3.5 to ESX3i (or latest product name) - save 300-400MB per ESX VM?