ESXi Home Lab on Fujitsu Primergy Econel 100S2 - Best options??

[Jason440]

Hello all

I've just purchased a Fujitsu Primergy Econel 100S2 server and I'm going to use it as a little ESXi home lab.

It's got a E3110 Xeon (3Ghz, dual core 6MB cache), 8GB ECC RAM , x2 250GB HDD's which can be used in RAID 0/1 but I hear from research online that ESXi 5 won't see the drives in RAID but not sure about version 6??

Anyway, What are my best options for this machine? Mainly which version of ESXi should I use and should I attempt to get RAID 0 working or will it be better off just using the 2 drives as 2 separate datastores with VM's on each (from a performance point of view).

I've not used ESXi since 3.5 so any advice with this is greatly appreshiated.

Regards,

Jason

[brunofernandez1 · Accepted solution]

as it's a home lab, i would recommend you to install esxi 6.0.

for performance reasons I would recommend you to make a raid 0 with both disks to have the max of I/O performance.

if you logical raid disk is not recognized, you can search on the internet for drives...this may be the problem why esxi doesn't see the disk...

by the way i would use the custom iso from fujitsu...there are probably more drivers in for your hardware

[Jason440]

Hi and thanks for your reply

Custom ISO from Fujitsu?? Where would I find this? I never knew there was one? Is it a custom ESXi ISO for Fujitsu servers?

Hopefully I can get RAID 0 working as both drives are only SATA.

As mentioned someone did have trouble doing this on ESXi 5. Hopefully 6 will not have any issues.

[paolomic]

https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/5_5#custom...

Doesn't look like they have published the 6.0 ISO yet, however there is a 5.5 one you can play with, then try and upgrade to 6.0

[Jason440]

Extremely helpful thank you very much, I'm downloading it now. Glad I posted here I had no idea OEM's made their own ISO's.

[paolomic]

You are most welcome.  The community here is very good.  Many times I've had to come and ask a question that was driving me nuts.

I try and help others as much as i can.  Good karma !

[Jason440]

Certainly seems that way!

I just hope my machine plays well with ESXi I've looked at afew threads and quite a number of people say it works but.. you never know..

[paolomic]

Just keep in mind ESXi 6.0 just came out and as much as VMware has worked hard to squash all the bugs, expect some weird things to happen.  I'm currently only running it on one server in my organization for testing since i can afford it (and the VM's) to go down in case something happens.

My experience so far has been pretty decent.  A few odd behaviours but nothing that would make me stop using it

[Jason440]

I may well stick to 5.5 for now then. My server isn't all that new hardware wise anyway so I'd imagine 5.5 will be a good fit for it.

I shall report back with my findings for this machine just in case anyone else has the same machine and needs answers.

[Jason440]

I can confirm this iso works flawlessly with this server all drives and NIC's found.

Great stuff!

--- EDIT: Having trouble finding my 5.5.0 U2 key for this iso, can anyone help?