setting up 4.1 update 1 on DL380 G7

[mla_]

Hello,
I installed and configure couple of VmWare servers with local and shared storage in Lab a year ago. And since that time I am working with Hyper-V. So need some refresh...

I have to deploy one ESXi 4.1 update 1 host with local storage.

Specs:
HP Proliant DL380 G7
7 HSs - SAS 146GB 15K
RAM - 32GB
4 NICs - 1Gb

(have to check if it is one controller with 4 ports or real four controllers. It's not me who ordered the machine)

May be somebody knows what comes by default in 380.

2 VMs to be installed: Server 2008 for the App and SQL server
I still don't have an answer to the question about real load (how many users will acess the host). But I know that the server is a monster for the required load.

Questions:

1. The best Raid(s) configuration with 7 HDs available.
I forgot partitioning options on ESX... Please remind...
In case of local storage, how VMs partition should be separated from HyperVisor.
Separate Raid? Mirror for HyperVisor and Raid5 for VMs. Or Raid 10 for everything and 1 hot spare disk?

2. Optimal Network configuration with 4 NICs (if there are 4, or just one with quad ports)

3. About USB flash for ESX itself. How reliable? How properly to protect the flash key (duplicate it), just if one fail to insert the other.

Or may be forget about it in my scenario and just install on HDs.

Please suggest the config that you will do for yourself with provided hardware.

Thanks,
Michael.

[DSTAVERT]

Considering that the server has already been ordered and will come with a given amount of storage how much space was intended to be available? For performance RAID 10 using 6 disks and a hot spare would be a good start. I personally would use the internal SD card slot for installing ESXi and leave all the storage for datastores. If you do end up doing RAID 10 for the drives and needed to a HD install I would use the Smartstart ACU to create a 5GB virtual disk for ESXi and the balance as a virtual disk for the datastore. The SD card install is quite safe in my opinion. There is almost no writing to the disk. ESXi loads directly into RAM. Even the log files are written to a RAM disk.

[Josh26]

My first recommendation would be to not use ESX, since it's going end of life.

If you use ESXi, all your partitioning questions are effectively obsolete.

[idle-jam]

it would be ESXi all the way from my advise, it saves your nightmare of fresh rebuild to the next version of ESXi.

[mla_]

Thanks to all for your advices.

Sorry I didn't specify in the subject VMWare version to be used.

It will be ESXi update 1 free versioin. Local storage, so no vMotion and etc...

Josh, please elaborate  > if you use ESXi, all your partitioning questions are effectively obsolete.

What will be the magic with ESXi?

Please make it clear.

Thanks.

Michael.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

ESXi doesn't provide any options to customize partitions.  If you install to less than 4.75 GB of space,  ESXi uses around 750  MB of space for 5 system partitions.  With 5 GB  ESXi will add another 4 GB partition (/scratch).  The preceeding partitions are fixed in size and you can't change them.  Any space over 5 GB gets formatted as a VMFS datastore.

[pob579]

David, thanks for clear answer.

What is an optimal NICs configuration?

There are: two 1GbE NC382i Multifunction 2 Ports (4 ports total)

[EXO3AW]

You could simply fire up a single vswitch and set all NICs to active and let ESXi handle all of the stuff - this should do the trick for sure.

But since you intend to host 2 VMs only and i'll assume you don't want to hassle around with NLB inside of them, 2 NICs for the "outside traffic" will suffice and you wouldn't benefit from adding more links, since ESXi free is not capable of any Network Load balancing, Link aggregation or "Trunks" so far. (Take a look in the switch options, they're fairly straight).

Just set up the corresponding up with one link from each NIC to have some kind of NIC failure redundancy.

So the other two NIC ports are free for your management network (which SHOULD be seperated from your normal duty network)