My home ESXi test environment
Jan 9, 2010 Server Virtualization, Technology
As an earlier post of mine stated I was looking into setting up an ESXi test environment. I previously have been running a custom installation of Ubuntu Hardy with VMware Server 1.0.5 on it. Even though that system has been running very reliable for the past year I wanted more. At my day job we have 2 ESX servers that run most of our infrastructure along with a few older servers that have not been moved virtual yet. I wanted to have a similar interface at home as we do at work so that is the reason for setting up this ESXi test environment. Below I will outline what hardware I am running on, special configurations for the machine and what I think so far after running it for a little over a week.
Hardware:
- 8GB USB Flash drive – ESXi Boots off of this device
- 4x Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive – Used for the RAID 10
- AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ Brisbane 2.9GHz Socket AM2 65W Dual-Core Processor Model ADO5600DOBOX
- MSI K9A2 Platinum AM2+/AM2 AMD 790FX ATX AMD Motherboard
- CORSAIR Dominator 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 1066 (PC2 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model TWIN2X2048-8500C5D – Soon to be upgraded to 6GB or 8GB
- 3ware 9650SE-4LPML PCI Express Lanes: 4 SATA II Controller Card
- Intel EXPI9402PT 10/ 100/ 1000Mbps PCI-Express PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Server Adapter 2 x RJ45
Software:
- VMware ESXi 4.0
- 3ware RAID Controller drivers from here
- vSphere Command-Line Interface
Installation:
The onboard NICs that are on the MSI motherboard are not supported by ESXi as they are Realtek chipsets. You can find some help attempting to install them at vm-help.com forum thread. When attempting to get these Realtek RTL8111/8168 drivers working you will have to update the oem.tgz file. After modifying this file myself I realized that I wanted hardware that was supported for a NIC which is when I purchased the Intel Pro 1000 card. Once I installed this new NIC I booted into the BIOS on the machine and disabled the onboard NICs. Re-installing ESXi to the USB flash drive without any modifications to the oem.tgz worked like a champ after installing the new NIC.
Take note that the 3ware RAID can only be used as secondary storage so you will need some other boot media like USB flash drive or another hard drive
Now to get the 3ware storage to be available to create a datastore on you need to install the drivers. You will need to download the 3ware drivers which are located at the bottom of the page under the Article Attachments (the .iso file). Once you download this you can use something like 7-Zip to extract the files to a folder. Once you have extracted the files you will need to navigate to the offline-bundle folder where you will find a .zip file that you will need to rename to offline-bundle.zip and move to your c:\. As the instructions found on the 3ware site say you will eventually need to run the following:
perl vihostupdate.pl -server x.x.x.x -username root -password “” -b c:\offline-bundle.zip -i
After a quick reboot you should be all ready to create your datastore on your RAID setup and start adding VMs.
Thoughts so far:
After a few weeks of running this setup so far I have found that it seems to be running smooth. I have found that it seems to take a while longer to install fully encrypted linux guests than non-encrypted guests. I am also disappointed to find that there is no vSphere client for linux as I frequently boot into Ubuntu. In a later posting I will post what machines I run on this test environment and some of their configurations.
