ESXI Hardware, what's more important?

[kin0kin]

Reading Performance Best Practice, everything seems so important. But we need to design a system with optimized throughput.

I understand that allocating each physical nic to each VM would ensure maximum bandwidth through the NIC.

What about the CPU? RAM? Host Storage?

I am designing our ESXI whitebox and am having a hard time getting the optimum hardware in there.

Requirement/Current Setup

#1 - The ESXI cannot fail, to a certain degree. It will host at least 8 webservers and our whole ERP. *we'd use non-ecc rams, single PSU (these are the tolerance we can live with)

#2 - The VMs have very minimal foot print, since most of them are using our NAS for storage. We symlink almost every required folders to our webservers so only the bare server is running as VM. Every two VMs share 1 gigabit port at the moment. Our NAS is parity protected.

#3 - Currently I'm seeing about 200GB space being used in our current VMWare Worstation.

#4 - We have a plex media server serving media files and it does transcode. The current CPU is an E1230v2. I see some spike to 70% and average load is about 10-20%, and about 40% when 2-3 clients are streaming medias. Please note that our other webservers have not gone public yet so we don't know how much traffic will come in.

We happen to be distributor for many hardwares and rams are not a problem at all. The current server is maxed out with 32GB. My questions are:

#1 - Would I need a dual socket E2620 or a 4930K be more than suffice?

#2 - Would having a ton more rams help?

#3 - Considering #2 and #3 of Requirement/Current Setup, should I go with Raid 10, 4 x 120gb, or 2 x 480GB Raid 1?

#4 - Does it matter if ESXI is sharing the disk with the other VMs? Would it make a difference if an ESXI is installed on small 60gb Raid 1 and the vmdks stored in a different datastore in raid 1/10?

[weinstein5]

Welcome to the Community - Keep in mind when virtualizing takes advantage that most machines are not highly utilized or if there are peaks they are at different times - this is true for memory, CPU and network - so you would not want to dedicate a NIC to a single VM.

If availability is a requirement you will need multiple ESXi hosts which allow you to configure HA (the VMware feature that allows a VM to restart if the host it is on fails) and DRS (which ensures that VMs are receiving sufficient resources.) - you will need shared storage which historically has been SAN or NAS but with vSphere 5 you can now use vSphere Storage Appliance which allows you to share the storage of individual ESxi hosts.

Now to your questions -

1) Either should suffice -

2) It all depends on how much memory the VMs will be actively using - you need to insure there is sufficient memory for the VMs and their applications

3) I would go with RAID 5 -

4) Have a separate mirrored set for the installation of ESXi -

[JarryG]

1. Any one of them should be enough (unless you have very highly loaded web), but I'd prefer to use Xeon over i7.

2. Depends on what is running on those 8 web-servers. Do you have dynamic content? Databases? etc. But generally, the more RAM, the better.

3. 4x120GB/raid10 gives you 240GB, 2x480GB/raid1 gives you 480GB. Depends on how much you need. But with so low demands I'd go SSD-way. Makes HUGE difference!

4. Should not make difference, as ESXi-image is loaded during boot-up and then never accessed. But I prefer having hypervisor separatelly (small USB, CF-card, etc).

[kin0kin]

Here's what I have planned running in the ESXI:

#1 - Plex Media Server - Serving the house and cellphones while on the go. Usually no more than 2 clients connect to it at the same time. Real Time transconding only applies to mobile clients, otherwise they are doing direct stream to clients. The server is a W2K8R2 and the media are stored in my NAS. The VM does nothing but host the plex media server and do the streaming and transcoding.

#2 - Piwigo Web Server (apache) - Serves as a front end to our enterprise' image. The images also go public and will be shared with our ecommerce site as well as other online forums. No actual data are stored in here, he folders are all symlinked to my NAS.

#3 - Magento E-Commerce (apache) #1 - This is a web store for our B2B, links to our ERP.

#4 - Magento E-Commerce (apache) #2 - This is a web store for public clients, links to our ERP.

#5 - Magento E-Commerce (apache) #3 - Another web store for our sister company, also links to our ERP.

#6 - Openerp Server (Postgres SQL) - Our ERP system, less than 10 clients connect to it at a time, but many of our webservers connect to it.

#7 - Wordpress CMS Webserve (apache) - One of our front end.

#8 - Acronis Server (W2K8R2) - Does all the backing up.

#9 - Cloud Server (Apache) - Our cloud server, accessible by employees and family only. No more than 3-5 concurrent access.

All the above runs about 24/7. Still finding ways to use the ESXI. How much juice would I need?