Home use VMware vSphere Hypervisor ESXi

[dolphs]

Hi,

I like to deploy a single ESXi host which holds max 5-8 CentOS VMs for educational purposes at home.

An HP420 RAID controller will be equipped with 4 SSDs and 4 HDDs ( 2x RAID10 ).

I have learnt IOPS is one of the key things in terms of disk performance, therefore has anyone experience with the Intenso SATA III High 2,5" SSDs (s-ata 600)?

I'm asking since The Intenso SSDs appear to have remarkable read 133.120 and write 128.000 Input/Output Operations Per Second?!

Instead should I stick with either Crucial (MX series) or Samsung (EVO series) SSDs ( relability ) ?

Also aiming to boot the ESXi Hypervisor on an 16Gb USB3.1 stick, again this is not meant for an enterprise environment and guess that should be fine considering the system won't be running 24/7.

Once storage is assigned to the Hypervisior I like to verify up front I can mount my linux VMs using both HDD and SSD storage, eg:

HDD:

/home

/tmp

/var

SWAP

SSD:

/

/usr

/opt

#srv

Looking forward to your feedback.

thanks!

[continuum]

You lost me at
> Once storage is assigned to the Hypervisior I like to verify up front I can mount my linux VMs using both HDD and SSD storage, eg:
ESXi stores your VMs as large files on a VMFS-partition.
Linux can not directly read VMFS 6 so the question about mounting becomes a little bit strange.
Please explain ...

[dolphs]

Thanks for your response.

I understand I can start assigning a vmdk to a disk ( non-ssd ) and install Linux.

Once Linux is up and running I can add another disk ( read: SSD ) to this VM.

Afterwards it can be mounted to Linux and I should be able to shift " /usr , /opt, ( and /srv ) " to the SSD disk.

Yet I wonder if this can be done at once rolling out a new VM.

Cheers

[continuum · Accepted solution]

When you install ESXi you create 2 datastores.
One on the harddisk used as "Datastore-HD"
One on the SSD used as "Datastore-SSD".
When you setup your Linux VM you create 2 VMDKs.
VMDK1 can be stored on the "Datastore-HD"
VMDK2 can be stored on the "Datastore-SSD".
During installation of the Linux-guest you select "custom partitioning.
VMDK1:
first partition: used for /
second partition> used for /home
third partition: used for swap
VMDK2
first partition: used for /usr
second partition: used for /opt
third partition: used for /opt
Does that sound like what you had in mind ?

[dolphs]

cheers that is indeed I was assuming and is verified.

Therefore will try this out shortly and if all OK I'll add 4 SSD's to my RAID controller.

Speaking of which any views on the Intenso SSDs, or instead should I stick with either Crucial (MX500 series) or Samsung (EVO 860 series) ?

[dolphs]

ticket can be closed this works as expected, thanks for help