ESXi setup and shared drives

[ChadLB]

OK so I have the following that I would like to convert to esxi 5.5 -

MB: Ga-ma785gmt-ud2h on-board five SATA II ports support RAID 0, 1, 0+1, and JBOD

Memory: 8GB       16gb max

CPU: Amd Phenom IIx6 1090T

I want to put a 500gb ssd in it for the VMs.

I have two 1tb drives that I would like to use  for storage and data duplication from my other File server.

What options are available to make the 1tb drives shared drives for file storage?

Would this work - https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san

[cykVM]

You should first try to perform an installation of VMWare on an empty disk with that motherboard. Since this is desktop hardware it might not or not fully be supported (e.g. NIC and/or storage controller not recognized by setup).

Sounds like you want to put up a production system or is this just a home lab "server"?

If this runs in a production environment I would strongly recommend using supported server hardware found in VMWare HCL.

For the shared drives: vSphere is not a fileserver OS and cannot share any drives or folders. You just can make the drives available as additional datastores and put a large virtual disk on it, include this disk in a VM config and share it from this (Windows/Linux/whatever OS) VM.

[ChadLB]

For home lab server.

So say I have 4 VMs built out for testing purposes.

How can all 4 VMs see the 1tb drives as a share? How do you great the shares within ESXi server.

So the 1tb drives with show up in datastore area.

Now I want to make each it's own share drive.

Thanks

[cykVM]

I think you did not fully get the point.

You create a virtual disk on the 1 TB harddrive, this is basically a large file (vmdk). One of your VMs is a server and you add this virtual disk to this server VM, format it inside the VM and share it from there.

Then the other 3 VMs can access this share. VMWare itself can't share drives it's not made for that pupose.

But, believe me, you should first make kind of a dry-run and try to install ESXi 5.5 on an old min. 40 GB disk to see if VMWare will run on that motherboard. I expect certain incompatibilities.

[ChadLB]

I had VM running on this MB a few years back but back at it again so I know it works on this board.

Ok that makes sense for the 1tb drives now.

[cykVM]

Maybe you should add some RAM to the system, too. Running 4 VMs with 2GB of memory might make them run kind of slow. Depends on OS and what services the VMs will provide.

[ChadLB]

Actually thinking of getting a mobo that supports 32gb or 64gb of memory.

[cykVM]

Then do it the right way and get away from desktop hardware. If it needs to be cheap try to find some refurbished/used Xeon server motherboard with RAM and CPU(s).

Really prevents you from further headaches.

[Alistar]

Hi there,

StarWind virtual SAN works like a charm - I am going to build my nested home lab around it

[ChadLB]

So I have it running on this machine at the moment.

I also was able to get the shared drive portion setup after doing a little digging on the net.

Question:

So I can pass through my IDE DVD rom drive but to go this route with this machine I want to be able to pass through my Sata Blu ray drive....is this possible?

Thanks

[Anton_Kolomyeyt]

Use StarWind Virtual SAN referenced above. It has an ability to do RDM (Raw Device Mapping) and iSCSI-ize hardware. Hard disks, tapes and optical drives work fine. So you expose your storage hardware over iSCSI and connect to target either from hypervisor or from inside a VM using guest iSCSI connection (host is preferred for disks and VM is better for optical & tapes). Free version here:

https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwind-virtual-san-free

You may ask support on how to manually edit configuration XML to expose Blu-Ray & DVDs as I'm not sure this functionality is exposed a public free version

[iiToby]

Hi ChadLB,

You can use Windows 2012 Server (Get a 90 Day Download) and use this as a File Server.

From here you can use Share out NFS / iSCSI to your ESXi servers

Also Windows 2012 has deduplication built in, however it is not supported (or recommended) to run dedupe on a volume that holds running virtual machines

Kind Regards

@iiToby

[Anton_Kolomyeyt]

1) It's a bad idea to use Windows built-in iSCSI & NFS for production with VMware. They are both NOT on HCL so are "self-supported". See:

https://technet.microsoft.com/de-de/library/hh831653.aspx?f=255&MSPPError=-2147217396

How to Enable NFS on Windows 2008 and Present to ESX | VMware Support Insider - VMware Blogs

So YES it works. But NO don't use it for production ))

2) Incorrect )) Or say - partially correct... Since Windows Server 2012 R2 it's absolutely OK to use MSFT dedupe with running VMs (plain vandal 2012 w/out R2 did not do it).

One thing so far - it's better for VMs to be more read-oriented (for some crazy reason MSFT keeps calling this scenario VDI...) then write-oriented. See:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh831700.aspx

What's New in Data Deduplication in Windows Server

Hope this helped )) Good luck!

[ChadLB]

Question:

So I can pass through my IDE DVD rom drive but to go this route with this machine as a Home Lab I want to be able to pass through my Sata Blu ray drive....is this possible?

Or do I need a correct MB that will do pass through.....

Thanks

[JPM300]

I used FreeNAS for my nested ESXi lab enviroment while working on my DCA

Also look at AutoLab for Vmware, sets up a lab pretty quick once you get it squared away.