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Schwan
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Shuttle Inc SK45 barebone & ESX3i update2 110271

Hi,

i was able to do an installation of the ESX3i on this barebone with an E7200 CPU an 2GB memory on a 8GB SSD 2.5" SATA from Transcend.

as i not have a ESX3i compatible PCI NIC - the onboard Marvell is not supported - i cannot test more details.

best regards,

Ivan

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wizdude
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I had a very similar issue with a motherboard where the NIC wasn't supported. I used an Intel e1000 style card and everything worked a treat.

they are available in a PCI format which can be used by your K45 barebone. they also have two and four port versions available, while obviously not suitable for production with only a PCI bus, they are an excellent choice for the home lab if you plan to play with virtualcenter and vmotion.

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Dave_Mishchenko
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If you have an Intel Pro/100 or 3Com 905 card around you might also want to try those. I use an Intel Pro/1000 GT for whiteboxes and it works fine.

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Davo-CC
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I'm just wondering - the SK45 you refer to, is this the K45 referred to at [http://au.shuttle.com/product_detail_spec.jsp?PI=1068] ?
Did you have any issues with the SATA controller? I have read of the need to use another NIC (I have some 3c905's available), I'm very interested in running a low power ESXi configuration in this way. I've also read that some have been successful in running the K45 with 4gig of ram (2x 2gig sticks).
Thanks!
DT
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Davo-CC
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Update - Successful Shuttle K-45 implementation with 4gig of ram


I don't know if anyone saw this thread, I did go out and pick up the Shuttle K-45 mentioned above with (overspec) 2x2gig sticks of generic DDR2-800 with a legacy PCI 3Com 3c905c NIC and a single 1tb WD Green drive - powered by a Core2 Duo E7300 (2x3mb cache, 45nm). The whole rig is running in this tiny case which is smaller than a shoebox, the only additional element I added was an extra Antec tri-cool 92mm fan which has the power switch set to the lowest speed. I used the 3c905c based on the advice above, it is clear that currently the onboard gb nic isn't supported (which is indeed a shame).

My objective was to build a small, low power consuming ESXi box that I could leave on 24/7 and not generate too much heat and also to reduce my astronomical domestic power bills to some extent; the noise generated by the little K-45 is higher than you'd expect but it seems to work ok.

I performed diagnostics on the ram with Memtest86 overnight prior to the build, the memory's only running at 667 speed but that seems to be fine - I'm finding so far that it's a pretty good solution. I overcame the lack of optical drive support by building the system initially with its lid off and a free-floating PATA CDRW drive reading the ISO file, I was able to externalize this arrangement by booting the system to an external 5.25" HDD caddy (open) with the CDRW drive plugged in there - it seemed to work perfectly well, it allowed me to install the ESXi system onto the 1tb drive without any significant issue.

I have built a series of VM's on there and performance is good, I certainly wouldn't want to run this thing on anything less than 4gig of ram though - one concern I have currently is that I have noticed that SMB data transfer from one of the VM's (WinXP-Pro SP3) is below par; it's transferring across large binary files to other workstations at about an average of 5.7m/sec which is compared to stand-alone machines on the same network (similar source drive) which can meter out data at 8-9m/sec and peaking at nearly 10. I'm not entirely sure why this is, I can't see any overload of ESXi when I look a the performance graphs; the HDD itself is more than capable of shuffling data out, I've been able to do this on an earlier experimental build so I'm currently thinking the problem is more with my ESXi config (I'm relatively new at this).

Overall though I'd say that this is a pretty good solution for a low power, small black-box solution that is ideal for domestic situations - the lack of an optical drive so far has only been a minor inconvenience during installation, the rest of the time it just sits there and does its job.

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martybauer31
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Davo, thanks for your post, I am also looking at this exact setup, I am not so concerned about performance as I am using this to just update my skillset and have something to play with, I may try to put together a couple of these....

I was looking at the specs for the K-45 and it appears that the memory limit is 2GB, and you say you are running with 4? Did you have to do anything special there or it just worked out of the box like that? I also did notice that it wouldn't work faster than the 667 speed you mentioned, which is ok with me. I am also going to drop in a Celeron E1200 dual core proc, I am assuming that this will satisfy the the ESXi need for dual core, someone please correct me if I am wrong, as I am trying to go as low budget as I can.

For storage I am using a Seagate Barracuda 320GB SATA drive I already have, what setting did you have to make on the bios with your 1 TB SATA to get the drive to be seen?

Thanks for the help!

Marty

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jnice304
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I have attempted to install ESXi 3.5.0 up2 and up3 on a shuttle sk45.

However, I receive the error: VMWARE installation error "Unable to find a supported device to write the VMware ESX 2i 3.5.0 image to" when i try to use a SATA or IDE drive.

I updated to the latest BIOS available on the suttle site the other day.

Using an IDE DVD/CDRW drive with slave setting on primary IDE; HDD is Master on IDE or i have also tried both SATA1 & SATA2.

After researching and finding the alt-f1 cmd: i did a fdisk -l and it shows the IDE drive--- Disk /dev/disks/vmhba0:0:0:0 40.0 GB

an lspci -v shows the storage controllers which are listed in the simple.map database.

IDE: 8086:27df

SATA: 8086:27c0

Any tips would be great.

Thanks

JT

UPDATE** So it turns out that using a SATA drive and going into the bios and selecting the option to reset to defaults was the trick.

Somewhere along the lines i must have had an improper BIOS setting... hmm.

Message was edited by: jnice304

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jnice304
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Comment on upgrading to update 3..

When the computer reboots i get the error:

PANIC: Failed to find HD boot partition

Its odd that it would lose the drive and all vm's and to fix it, i have to go back and reset the bios to defaults.

this could get annoying when the future updates come out...

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wizdude
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this is because starting with update 3, local datastores on ICH7 are NOT SUPPORTED.

you've probably already worked most of the other stuff out. you can change the AHCI mode and get the box booting again.

from the release notes at http://www.vmware.com/support/vi3/doc/vi3_esx35u3_rel_notes.html

  • Intel ICH-7 (supported in IDE/ATA mode only with SATA CD or DVD drives)

Note: Storing VMFS datastores on drives connected to these controllers is not supported.

and also

New: Not able to recognize local VMFS volumes after upgrading to ESX Server 3.5 Update 3.

On servers mounting ICH-7 SATA controller configured in ATA mode, after

upgrading to ESX 3.5 Update 3, the ESX Server host might not be able to

recognize local VMFS volumes and virtual machines located on the

volumes will be inaccessible.Note: storing local VMFS volumes is unsupported with ICH7 and HT1000 controllers). See Upgrading to ESX 3.5 Update 3 Causes Local VMFS Volume to be Unrecognized (KB 1007724) for more information.

I've made some changes to my advanced config and rescanned to find my local datastore. everything is running fine, but I now need to consider whether I should continue running this same hardware configuration. I also have not yet tried a fresh install of ESX3i U3 to see whether or not you can even CREATE a local datastore.

cheers, wizdude.

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chjerome
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Hi, everybody,

I'm trying to install esxi u3 on my k45 shuttle with maxtor 500go sata2 disk. I can't succed to install esxi image even if the alt+f1 command show me that my disk is recognized by the system. Is there any setting int the bios wich can help esxi to be installed on the sata disk ? I can't find any sata mods config in the bios, so I don't how some of you have succeded ^^

Thank for your help

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Dave_Mishchenko
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Try the IDE install method on www.vm-help.com.

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Davo-CC
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Does anyone know why they're precluding support for the ICH7 controllers at all? I'm afraid to go anywhere near any upgrades now for fear of this, given the SK45's form factor (and that the mobo has its only slot taken up with a necessary EtherPro 1000 NIC) this is a significant deal breaker for me.... I tried looking into the issue linking to a referenced PDF in the KB 1007724 but that appears to be a dead link (it goes to a search page which can't find it).
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Dave_Mishchenko
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It's more that VMware wanted to provide better support for ICH7 connected CD-ROMs rather than break the ability to create VMFS on ICH7 connected drives. If you create an oem.tgz file which sets the ICH7 to continue to use the ata_piix driver then you don't have to worry about a future update breaking it.

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PCGIT
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I've had this problem with the Shuttle SK45 as well. Only way i got around it is by installed U2 and upgrading through the VM Upgrade Service. You have to change the simple.map from ide to atii_pix and things work ok. I made a custom oem.tgz and changed the simple.map but that didn't work either. We abandoned U3 as it doesn't provide any useful updates at the moment.

Tony

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