Help me build an ESXi home lab

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Metalman35

New Member
Jul 10, 2013
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I want to build an ESXi lab that I can use for general testing and labbing, nothing else. The computer will sit under my TV in the living room, while I will be sitting in another room, and connect to the different VMs with Remote Desktop (they will all mostly run Windows (Win7, Server 2008 R2 and Server 2012). I'm thinking of starting off with 32GB ram, and then upgrading it to 64GB in a years time.

ESXi 5.1 will boot off from a USB 3.0 stick.

This is my setup so far, please provide critique and guidance :)

Case

Fractal Design Node 605

Amazon.com: Fractal Design Node 605 Silent Home Theater Computer Case FD-CA-NODE-605-BL: Computers & Accessories

Motherboard

GIGABYTE GA-X79-UP4

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...irtualParent=1

CPU

Intel Xeon E5-1620

Ram

Patriot Extreme Performance Viper 3 DDR3 PC12800/1600MHz 32GB (4x8GB)

Disk + Raid Controller

Not Descided yet, might perhaps go with 2x Seagate Constellation CS ST2000NC001 64MB 2TB for disk

PSU

Fractal Design Newton R3 600W

No Graphics adapter.
 

dba

Moderator
Feb 20, 2012
1,477
184
63
San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA
If you can get away with relatively small virtual machines, then I highly recommend using SSD drives instead of spinning drives for VM storage. Running multiple VMs on a non-SSD drive capable of only around 100 IOPS makes for a very sluggish experience. Pick up a 512GB SSD and you can run a whole pile of lab VMs nicely.
 

mrkrad

Well-Known Member
Oct 13, 2012
1,244
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We have had great success with the samsung 840 pro once we bumped down to 30% OP. The samsung 830's whilst slower operated fine at 0% OP. However the MWI on the 830's went down far faster so I bumped both of them to 30% OP. Very fast. Very reliable.

It does require tuning with megaraid cards (IR mode) - Hints: Reduce patrol scan and Consistency to 1% instead of 30% . Tune the blocksize to your ssd block size (too large induces latency).

I'd strongly suggest using SLC SD or USB sticks, you only need 2GB for esxi with logs (ram,separate storage). If you have 8GB or more, esxi will be glad to place the logs on the usb or sd card but i'm not sure this is wise.

Then again you pickup new older SLC drives for $1/gb and just boot off one (or raid-1) two of those. Older samsung SLC drives or X25-E are reliable.

The true benefit of using the SLC usb boot option is being able to rip out the raid controller/drives and throw in something completely different without having to reload anything. P410 smartarray with hard drives to LSI ssd . Simply shutdown, remove old raid card/drives, throw in new raid controller and ssd, boot up. done.

I would not recommend using MLC unless you are doing this for fun and can suffer failure. Back in the days, 2GB SD (not sdhc) and USB drives could address the entire volume in byte mode rather than having to address in sector mode. Less latency with random i/o.

Modern Class 10 drives are rated for linear read/write only, and class 6 devices are actually faster at random i/o.

HP 2GB SLC sticks maintain 16 meg read/write across the board random or linear without any variation. They are quite expensive and look ghetto as all heck (if you've ever seen one, you'll seriously question if it is fake or real )