Hello, I am a tech for a small school district. I have installed esxi / vsphere 5 before and know the basic steps. My situation is: we were running 2 dell power edge systems with vsphere 5 and a vcenter server. Our small district has shrunk to the point of only needing a basic dc, webserver, and fileserver vm's. 1 of the two power edge systems suffered a raid hardware failure and took us down. I was allowed to purchase a new single server to replace the 2 power edges (the last is barely hanging on and Veeam whole vm backups have been made).
This system has the following:
10v2197 SERVER CHASSIS, INTEL 4U P4304XXMUXX - TOWER 4x3.5" BAY, NO PS,
11v1150 (2) POWER SUPPLY, INTEL 750W PLATINUM EFFICIENCY, FXX750PCRPS
15v3070 MOTHERBOARD, INTEL SERVER S2600CW2 SOCKET R3 (LGA2011-3),
20v2545 (2) PROCESSOR, INTEL XEON E5-2620v3, 2.4GHz, HEXACORE, LGA20-3,
20x1045 (2) HEAT SINK, INTEL PASSIVE SOCKET R3 (LGA2011-3), AUPCWPBTP
10v9925 (2) HOT SWAY BAY, INTEL 4x3.5" DRIVE ENCLOSURE, FUP4X35S3HSDK
25v2455 (8) MEMORY, KINGSTON 8GB 2133MHz DDR4 ECC CL15 1.2V, KVR21R15S4/8
90v2105 RAID CONTROLLER, INTEL 8 PORT SAS 6GB/s, RMS25PB080
90v2067 RAID CABLE, INTEL 2.87' (875MM) MINI-SAS to MINI-SAS HD (2 CABLES),
35z1285 (2) SSD, INTEL DC S3500 80GB 2.5" 7mm, SATA, 6GB/s, SSDSC2BB080G401 Raid1 RAID 1 - OS
35v1396 (4) HARD DRIVE, WD 2TB SATA 3.5" 6GB/S 7200RPM, WD2000FYYZ Raid10 RAID 10 - DATA
90v2048 INTEL REMOTE MANAGEMENT FOR KVM, AXXRMM4LITE
45V1300 DVDRW, LiteOn 24x INTERNAL SATA, IHAS124-04
I have highlighted the 2 parts that I have not dealt with before. That is having separate ssd raid 1 os partition and a raid 10 data partition with all the spin drives on it.
When I go to install the hypervisor, would I normally just use the ssd for the hypervisor and then create a datastore using the 4tb of spin drives (8tb prior to raid 10 being applied)?
Or should I just ignore the raid 1 ssd section and put everything on the spin drives?
Thanks a ton for any tips!
Hi and welcome to the forums!
I'm going to go on a limb here and presume that you don't have Enterprise Plus licensing? If you did then it is possible we could have used Flash Read Cache but let assume this is not an option.
The first question I'd be asking is how critical is it to have the host running all the time - especially important to answer as you appear to have only one server. With this answered it may hep you choose between the two options I would consider - I'm sure there are more but lets start with two.
OPTION 1:
OPTION 2:
With both options I would configure the drives as follows:
I normally prefer to have ESXi installed on disks dedicated to it rather than sharing with VM data. It can make it harder to move these disks to other hosts in the future if required as ESX generally dislikes seeing another copy of itself at boot time. Only an issue if you have another ESXi instance on the target server.
Not sure if this helps or hurts ![]()
