ESXi 5 / Dell T110-II

[tjplano]

Hello, all.

I'm interested in purchasing one of the newer Dell T110-II systems to run ESXi 5, but I haven't seen any comments in the forums yet about experiences with this model.  I've checked the compatibility guide to see whether the system is supported with ESXi 5, and I see it is.  I also need RAID support, and I see the H200 RAID card is also supported.  I'm relatively new to ESXi though, and before I dropped cash on this system I wanted to ask whether there might be any gotchas.

I'm considering:

T110-II w/ quad core Xeon E3-1230

8 GB RAM (2x4 GB dual ranked UDIMM)

H200 RAID controller with a pair of RAID-1 groups

I see the H200 supports SATA or SAS disks.  Would ESXi 5 work fine with either?  I ask because I've seen older posts around ESXi 4 not supporting SATA on the H200 at its first release.

And while not exactly an ESXi question, I see the spec sheet for the H200 indicates that it supports a max of "2 virtual disks".  If I were to populate the server with 6 disks and I use 4 of those for the 2 RAID-1 groups, does that mean disks 5-6 are unusable/unrecognized?  I'm just not sure how to interpret that spec sheet.

Any comments/info/gotchas much appreciated.  Thanks in advance.

[golddiggie]

If this is for something like a home test lab, or other lab environment, I would skip the RAID card and drives in the server. Install ESXi 5 to an USB flash drive (4-8GB is more than enough) and use the money you would have spent on the RAID card and drives to pick up a SAN/NAS... The part that applies to the home lab is the level of SAN you get. You could get by with a chassis from QNAP (the newer models, that are VMware certified), populating them with decent sized drives for pretty short money.

I'm using a QNAP TS-559 Pro+ chassis in my lab, running ESXi 5 on an 8GB Sandisk Cruzer flash drive. Performance is the same (or at least no less) than when running on a pair of 146GB 15k rpm SAS drives on a PERC 6/i controller. I'm even seriously thinking about continuing to run off of the flash drive and reallocate the drives inside the host for other things. As it stands, I'm not using them for anything. All my VM's sit on my SAN, which makes it easier. With dual Gb NIC's, you can set it up for high performance too. More than enough for a lab setting.

[tjplano]

Hi, and many thanks for the reply!

This is going to be a production system, running a couple of copies of Windows (SBS 2008 and 2008 R2), which is why I really wanted to go with RAID.  It's to be the only server for the business, so my thinking was that RAID-1 would be the way to go to avoid being completely down as a result of a single disk failure.  If it were only a lab system, then I'd certainly forego the RAID and allocate those funds elsewhere (as you say, with SAN/NAS).

Hard drive technology being what it is, it'd likely be years before my lightly-used drives would actually fail, but with my luck, well, let's just say that's not a theory I want to test. 

[golddiggie]

I have my SAN setup using RAID 5 (5 drives, so really the only viable option)... If you install ESXi 5 to an USB flash drive, you could set up all six of the drives on the RAID card as a RAID 10 array. That will give you best redundancy, solid performance, and good capacity. You just need all six drives to match.

I've not seen any business setup a single ESX/ESXi host before. It's always at least a pair, so that you can have HA, and not worry if you need to take one of the hosts offline to work on it, or apply updates. I have a single host in my home lab and wish I had a second one. With just one host, if you need to do anything with it, or anything goes sideways, you're hosed. With at least two, you can put it into maintenance mode, vMotion all the VM's off of it (or the business critical ones) keeping them online while you do what you need to.

Personally, I'd never advise putting a single host server into any company, no matter what the size is. Sure, it will cost them a bit more at the start, but the functionality they gain from it, makes it well worth it. Especially the first time you need to do anything with the host servers.

[Blueseed]

Who wants to install Esxi 5 on a Dell T110 v2, I would not recommend it just yet. Stay on 4.1

My spec, H200 using Raid 10 on x4 750Gb drives, 16Gb of Ram, x1 Xeon 3.5Mhz 4 core, Cost £1400 including a copy of 2008 R2.

Licence limitations for free Exsi 5, 8GB of Maximum Ram allowed per host, 4 cores only.

Raid 1 a waste of time as performance is improved over a raid 10 option. This spec at best can support only three 2008 R2 hosts, you will notice performance issues.

My recommendation, for a small SMB you only use this server with two internal hosts.

Driving Esxi 5 off of a USB drive is a waste of time as there are no performance benefits. My thoughts, the USB key will fail before for the Raid 10 array falls foul to a disk error or failure.

Now I found out the hard way. there are no patch updates via a simple console yet, you will need more hardware for vcenter support. There are still lots of Esxi 5 issues. The icing on the cake was this, http://communities.vmware.com/message/1835886 prior to this issue I could not mount my image due to the new Unified 1MB File Block Size. :smileyconfused: