Hi,
I am starting to use ESXi 5.0 (I think thats the right name, the free version at home in a lab basically).
I've found, for those interested, that the ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Gen3 motherboard works out of the box with ESXi 5, both Gigabit LAN ports work, and the SATA ports work too. I'm also using an ASRock Z68 Pro3-M works too (but only one LAN port of course). It made it easier that ESXi 5.0 installs out of the box onto USB ports on these units too. Very easy to setup.
I'm thinking about storage now. I have an Adaptec 2410SA 4 port raid card, but I think it's software, and its definatley SATA 1.
I'm using it for a couple of things I care about the data for (but very low useage home stuff) and several things I dont really care about that much. I intend to be running OpenFiler, Ubuntu, possibly Open SUSE, Windows 2008, Windows 8 (when it works). Its all dev/test stuff for me mostly.
I have 2 boxes now, and I might add a 3rd, as well as my desktop.
Machine 1
ASRock Fatal1ty Z68 Gen 3 MB
16GB GSkill RAM (4x4GB)
Machine 2
ASRock Z68 Pro3M
16GB GSkill RAM (4x4GB)
2nd Gigabit PCI Network card (will get one if a random one I have doesnt work)
I have 3x1TB disks, and 3x2TB disks plus some smaller ones. I'm tossing up a couple of options I thought I'd see what the community thought of, with more experience than I before I spent a lot of time on it.
Option 1.
ESXi on Machine 2 with several disks used indervidually. Work out a nightly backup to a second disk or another machine (QNAP NAS) for anything I care about.
Option 2.
ESXi on Machine 2, using Disks via iSCSI from Open Filer on Machine 1, using several disks in RAID 5 using the in build MB or OpenFiler RAID.
Option 3
ESXi on Machine 2, 3 disks inside.
One VM as Open filer on this machine, using the 3 disks as volumes to create a single raide 5 partion to be sharred out to other local VM's via iSCSI.
This allows me to also replicate the OpenFiler data to an external machine, or to use the second machine as a Hyper V Windows 8 host to get familure with another hypervisor.
I dont need huge performance (obviously with whiteboxes) but I dont want poor performance due to setup.
I know I could go for a hardware RAID card in the ESXi server, but I'm finding the choice of cards and cost a bit of a barrier right now. Current hardware is repurposed (apart from extra RAM).
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Cheers.
