Possibility of building required system with ESXi

[stristan]

Hi All!

My hardware will be:

1. Intel 5520 platform with 2 x Xeon 55xx series

2. 24 Gb of memory

3. 8 x SAS HDDs with Adaptec 5805 controller

I need with this hardware deploy the ASP.NET web-project with PostgreSQL database backend

It is a possible to build on this hardware with ESXi 2 VMs:

1. Windows Web Server 2008 64-bit running IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET application:1 CPU, 12 Gb RAM, 2 x SAS on RAID 1

2. Solaris 64-bit running PostgreSQL: 1 CPU, 12 Gb RAM, 2 x SAS for OS on RAID 1, 4 x SAS for PostgreSQL databases on RAID 10

Problem is that for ESXi no HDD present (8 is the maximum).

What configuration possible (if possible) with no perfomance degradation?

[microkid]

Why would you want to have raid in your VM's? You don't need raid in your VM's as long as the storage is redundant by itself.

So use the 8 HDD's to create a RAID-5 or RAID-6 storage array, and configure your VM's with the required virtual disks.

So, for example, if you have 8 72GB disks, create a 504GB RAID-5 set and then create a datastore on it.

For your VM's:

Windows Web Server 2008 64-bit running IIS 7.0 and ASP.NET application:1 CPU, 12 Gb RAM, 1 virtual disk.

Solaris 64-bit running PostgreSQL: 1 CPU, 12 Gb RAM, 1 virtual disk for OS, 1 virtual disk for PostgreSQL databases

[stristan]

Thanks for the informative reply!

One more question - if I have created RAID on 8 disks - then I must to divide it into a 2 LUNs: 1 for the ESXi installation and 1 for VMs? What is your recomendation?

[DSTAVERT]

Install ESXi to a USB memory stick. No lun for ESXi required. ESXi is very small and it only requires a 1GB partition (2GB if you want to have extra) if you need to install to your array.

[stristan]

Thanks