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1,890 Views 6 Replies Last post: Aug 5, 2008 5:47 AM by mparent RSS
mparent Novice
mparent
11 posts since
Jun 25, 2008
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Aug 2, 2008 4:13 PM

ESXi 3.5 on a budget

 

I really wanted to get an esx host running, I don't have the money (being a poor student) to buy a fancy server so I pieced together some spare parts and I now have ESXi 3.5 running on an Asus A8N motherboard, an AMD X2 4400+ with 1.5GB of ram, and a WD 320GB Sata drive.  I have 4 vm's running on it now, and performance is smooth so far.

 

 

It may not be an HP Proliant BL480 with 32GB ram, and SAN storage, but it is pretty sweet

 

 

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Dave.Mishchen… Guru User Moderators vExpert
Dave.Mishchen…
11,904 posts since
Nov 15, 2005
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1. Aug 2, 2008 5:03 PM in response to: mparent
Re: ESXi 3.5 on a budget

Nice job - what sort of SATA controller does ESXi report the system as having?

mparent Novice
mparent
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Jun 25, 2008
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2. Aug 2, 2008 5:23 PM in response to: Dave.Mishchen…
Re: ESXi 3.5 on a budget

I had some issues initially, so in the bios I have serial ata set to raid.  ESXi is showing it as a CK804 Serial ATA Controller.  However, it may work without setting it to raid, I found out my issue was a bad CD.

Dave.Mishchen… Guru User Moderators vExpert
Dave.Mishchen…
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3. Aug 2, 2008 11:11 PM in response to: mparent
Re: ESXi 3.5 on a budget

so in the bios I have serial ata set to raid

From what I've seen so far,  none of the SATA drivers that ship with ESXi support RAID if there's a software component required for RAID to work.

Smeagol Enthusiast
Smeagol
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Jul 7, 2005
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4. Aug 3, 2008 12:40 AM in response to: Dave.Mishchen…
Re: ESXi 3.5 on a budget

You can also boot the esx server from usb and use NFS,

 

Plus then you can use HA and DRS, maybe even DPM.

jamesserver Lurker
jamesserver
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Aug 4, 2008
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5. Aug 4, 2008 5:31 PM in response to: Smeagol
Re: ESXi 3.5 on a budget

 

Very Cool!! Does ESXi recognize the NIC's and SATA drive? I too am looking to put together a really cheap virtual server. I am thinking of going with the X2 6000+.

 

 

mparent Novice
mparent
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Jun 25, 2008
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6. Aug 5, 2008 5:47 AM in response to: jamesserver
Re: ESXi 3.5 on a budget

 

The drive and nic are both recognized fine.  I now have 5 vm's installed, I plan to run two at a time.  Mostly just to play with different OS's, among other things. The average cpu doesn't seem to go above 50%, when running two vm's memory usage gets to about 1.2GB (my vm's have 512MB each).  When no vm's are running, memory usage is about 350MB +/- a few mb.

 

 

 

 

 

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