ESXi & CASE ADVICE: 2u - F.H. PCI slots: Rails - not too deep... Data Recovery idea.

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TrumanHW

Active Member
Sep 16, 2018
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Would IDEALLY like to fit about 24 x 3.5" HDDs...

8 slots in case I need to recover a RAID array or clone drives.

4 more free for to make targets when I do recoveries.

And MAYBE! (I know know how transparent ESXi really can let your hard drives be, which is CRUCIAL in this case alone with the PCI slots being associated with specific OS's) ...

But, I have one program I use which is via a thin DOS installation, and then uses it's own SATA commands (can't have ESXi interfering.

Have 2 more that needs ABSOLUTE -- 100% control over their PCI cards, (they secretly run operating systems, and Id like to be able to install the application without it saying it sees ESXi. :) (I've seen the thing that lets you pass things through -- but I don't know if I can map it to an actual SLOT, and I don't know if it's close to bare metal, or if it IS bare metal.

And lastly, I want to make a RAID Array, probably internal drives as well as a SAS controller from an external enclosure ... for a tiered (I think I read this was possible) ZFS Array / nested array...

And if NVMe drives keep coming down - maybe I'd want one that's a mixture of 2.5" NVMe and 3.5" slots for older systems which are what's failing these days.



Anyone track well enough to make suggestions?

Thanks!! :)
 

TrumanHW

Active Member
Sep 16, 2018
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EXACTLY! Now, I do admit, I preferred when they did them vertically (as you can fit 14 x 3.5" drives in a racks width)... but, 24 drives is great!

And, I LOVE the 3647 CPU as they have quite a few lanes and all the processor features you could want. They probably have a two-node unit like that, and even the E5, 2600-v3 have quite a few PCI lanes... which means that as NVMe's get cheap enough at 4TB, I can start replacing my drives with uber hamazing SSDs and have the PCI bandwidth to do it.

Do you think it's practical via something like ESXi to map the PCI slots per each OS that I run, to have true hardware level control over the slot per OS virtualized?

THANK YOU! :-D
 

Iaroslav

Member
Aug 23, 2017
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Kyiv
Vertically positioned HDD's only possible in at least 3U case, I think.
Never tried any hard usage of passthrough devices, excepting a test of 10G nic card, utilizing almost full bandwidth - and I didn't get any reasonable result.