Low(est) power ESXI host?

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HellDiverUK

Active Member
Jul 16, 2014
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OK, so I have taken:

i5 NUC D54250WYK board,
TranquilPC Abel passive case,
12GB RAM (8GB Crucial & 4GB Crucial DDR3L-1600)
480GB M500 mSATA
Sandisk Cruzer Fit 8GB
ESXI 5.5

Put it all together and you get a decent little ESXI host that uses less than 10W at the wall. I'm hopefully going to P2V three existing machines and save myself about 100W.
 

HellDiverUK

Active Member
Jul 16, 2014
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I'll sort out pics and a quick howto on Monday, machine isn't quite finished yet, been busy fussing with other stuff.
 

johnnyfive

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Jun 24, 2014
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I'm curious, why run ESXI on something so small? As opposed to whatever dedicated OS you wanted for a specific job? This is genuine curiosity.
 

PigLover

Moderator
Jan 26, 2011
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A bit off-topic because its Hyper-V and not ESXi, but I run Hyper-V on a SuperMicro X10SBA (J1900 4-core bay trail) with 16GB, two SSDs (old 32GB Intel for boot, 480GB SanDisk Extreme II for VMs) and an extra 4-port Intel Pro NIC card inside a SuperMicro 1U Atom case with a 200W Platinum PSU. PSU is massive overkill (duh!).

Whole thing sits at 15W at the all.

I'm curious, why run ESXI on something so small? As opposed to whatever dedicated OS you wanted for a specific job? This is genuine curiosity.
Easy answer: because you can.

Better answer: there are a lot of workloads that just don't need a lot of horsepower. My box runs my primary Domain Controller, DNS, freepbx and is being prepped as my pfsense router. This box, my main GigE switch, cable modem and my WiFi AP are all on a UPS by themselves. They are the only things that I really need running and together they draw about 50W - which the UPS can hold for hours and hours. Getting the "critical" but low-touch workloads onto a single really low power server is the way to get this done.

The rest of the rack has about 15 minutes of UPS hold time and shuts itself down at 50% battery.
 
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Patrick

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Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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I'm curious, why run ESXI on something so small? As opposed to whatever dedicated OS you wanted for a specific job? This is genuine curiosity.
Here is my use case: Intel Atom C2550 quad core, 32GB RAM that runs Hyper-V with my pfsense firwall + site-to-site VPN, ubuntu MAAS server, and a few other random small VMs.

It consumes under 20w and if I use beta pfsense images and mess anything up, I can revert to snapshots within 2 clicks and under 1 minute.
 

HellDiverUK

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Jul 16, 2014
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As others have said, it's power consumption. Less than 10W typical, replacing three machines dotted around the house. Its also basically silent.

I have a Windows 7 instance running that runs the software for monitoring the solar panels - software which is really fussy and doesn't sit well with other stuff on the same machine. I have a Server 2012R2 instance running for DHCP/DNS/WDS/WSUS, and I have another Windows 7 instance running I use for remote access and 'dirty' work, which is easily restored using a snapshot if/when required. I'll also be putting a linux node on there to run a bitcoin node.

Besides, as I said, I have the machine sitting doing nothing, and it was a fun project getting it working. :)
 

Katama

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Mar 9, 2011
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OK Patrick, so your Rangely articles have me gunning to try out an Atom. I'm going to pick up a SM A1SRM-2758F system. But I am not sure what to expect if I go the route of putting ESXi on it and running a couple of VMs on it (I am thinking of maybe a small NAS and a Linux and server 2012 sandbox?). I know it supports VT-x (yea, virtualization!) but no direct i/o (VT-d). What will this mean in terms of the performance I should expect on this platform? Should I avoid a NAS VM on a non-VT-d platform? Will my disk i/o (vmdk files?) suck noticeably?

Maybe it would make more sense to run Server2012 and try out hyper-V for virtualizing extra instances; at least that way I would have a standard NTFS volume instead of a bunch of vmdk files?
 

TuxDude

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Sep 17, 2011
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I know it supports VT-x (yea, virtualization!) but no direct i/o (VT-d). What will this mean in terms of the performance I should expect on this platform? Should I avoid a NAS VM on a non-VT-d platform? Will my disk i/o (vmdk files?) suck noticeably?
It means you can't pass a PCIe device through to a VM, eg. give direct access to an SAS controller to a NAS VM. Disk IO to VMDK files is not affected.

Maybe it would make more sense to run Server2012 and try out hyper-V for virtualizing extra instances; at least that way I would have a standard NTFS volume instead of a bunch of vmdk files?
VHD(X) files on an NTFS volume, or VMDK files on a VMFS volume. Same thing either way, though in the event of a failure it would be easier to plug the NTFS drive into a different system to recover the data.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Hyper-v will let you pass a raw disk through to a vm without using VT-d. EXSI will too but it is a PITA to set up and not officially supported.
 

HellDiverUK

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Jul 16, 2014
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Well, abandoned this project. VMWare's free hypervisor is pointless, in the fact it's free for the hypervisor, but the management software is not. So after 60 days you're stuffed and can't manage the hypervisor, unless you shell out for vSphere Client - even if you want to run the web management. Totally, totally baffling and bizarre.

I only wanted to use ESXI because it's the only Hypervisor I can see that allows USB passthrough, and I really need USB on one of my VMs (the power monitoring machine which needs Bluetooth and a USB connection to my power meter).

Unless I'm missing something?
 

markarr

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Oct 31, 2013
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TuxDude

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Sep 17, 2011
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Unless I'm missing something?
I've never heard of them charging for vSphere Client before. You should be able to use ESXi free edition and manage it for as long as you like. You do have to put in a free license key, the eval mode will end after 60 days.
 
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lmk

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Dec 11, 2013
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The big question is in regards to VMware's apparent push to get rid of having both versions of clients - slowly limiting the original desktop/C# client and only adding features/access to web-based clients. The 5.5 release actually locked out users from modifying the VMs, if the HW version was upgraded, and this was 'fixed' after a few months (with the updates @markarr mentioned) and after upsetting a lot of users.

However...

@markarr - Note that, currently, the web-based client allows for more changes than the desktop client.

E.g. As per VMware, "With vSphere 5.5 Update 2, you have the ability to edit a Virtual Hardware 10 VM using the vSphere Client (a.k.a C# or thick client). You are able to edit hardware version 9 and 10 VMs, but only on the feature level of hardware version 8."

Not sure what the new version 6.0 will have in store.
 

HellDiverUK

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Jul 16, 2014
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My current VMs are V9 on 5.5U2. My 'vSphere Client' says it's going to expire in 55 days.

As a total n00b to ESXi, where does that leave me? Please explain in simple layman's terms. :)

What do I need to get in order to manage the server in the future, and is it going to be free?
 

HellDiverUK

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Jul 16, 2014
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I've never heard of them charging for vSphere Client before. You should be able to use ESXi free edition and manage it for as long as you like. You do have to put in a free license key, the eval mode will end after 60 days.
Ah. Lightbulb moment. I need to put in the free licence code on the host, and that should clear the licence warning on the vSphere Client - it's not the client that's in evaluation mode, it's the host. Doh!

So, if I keep my VMs in V9 or lower mode, I should be good to go?