Newb Build

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Marsh

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May 12, 2013
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Following up on BennyT reply,

Windows 8.1 Pro and Windows 10 have hyper-v role feature. No need to paid extra license.

Windows 8.1 works as a functional home windows fileserver.
You could run all sort of linux vm as well.
 
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Gadgetguru

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Dec 17, 2018
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If you like ESXi and if you are not commercial/production environment, you can get full editions/enterprise of just about all vmware products including ESXi, vCenter Server Appliance, workstation pro etc by subscribing to VMUG advantage. Only limitation is to keep at 6 sockets or less, but there are no RAM limitations. I subscribed for 3 yrs which brought the yearly subscription rate down from $200 to $170 per yr. $510 USD for 3 years. I applied a 10% off coupon to that which brought it down to $459 for three years. It's a nice package deal and the workstation pro can be used as remote console to the ESXi guest VMs, works almost like a VNC.

MS Hyper-V Standalone edition on the other hand is completely free. I've not tried it but sounds like it installs outside of windows (windows server is not needed for Hyper-v standalone). Or if you have Windows Server 2016 I think you can simply enable Hyper-V inside of server 2016 and bam, you are ready to virtualize.
I didn't realize there was a standalone version of Hyper-v, that's cool. That would be something to consider, as now I don't want to have a full blown Windows install to run VMs in. What would be the correct terminology, bare metal hypervisor?

I've tried Hyper-v (within Windows) quite a while ago. I can't tell you exactly why, don't remember, but I know I didn't care for it and switched back to VirtualBox. Not that VirtualBox didn't have its quirks and issues.

For now, I think I will continue down the ESXi path.
 
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Gadgetguru

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Dec 17, 2018
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I can easily add a physical drive (raw disk) to a VM. It's like 3 clicks and done, don't have to do anything else (create a datastore, partition, format).

It cannot be added to more than one VM at a time.

I can just as easily remove it from one VM and add it to another VM. No need to shut them down.

So that is great and easy if I want access to an entire drive at once.
 

Gadgetguru

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Dec 17, 2018
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Any reason to create more than one datastore with a single host? I can add storage whether its another partition on the same drive, partition on another drive, or add another complete disk.
 

Gadgetguru

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And I just found another one... You can't remove an extent from a datastore. Have to delete the datastore and start over.
 

Gadgetguru

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Dec 17, 2018
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Redid things on my server. Added the Intel RAID card back it, set up a RAID 0 with the SSDs and a RAID 1 with the two 10TBs. Installed ESXi on a USB drive. Booted it up, all good. However, I can't reach the VMWare client from my computer. If I try from my phone on wifi, no problem. Stumped.
 

BennyT

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Dec 1, 2018
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Redid things on my server. Added the Intel RAID card back it, set up a RAID 0 with the SSDs and a RAID 1 with the two 10TBs. Installed ESXi on a USB drive. Booted it up, all good. However, I can't reach the VMWare client from my computer. If I try from my phone on wifi, no problem. Stumped.

Hi Gadget,

I like those SAS SSDs and controllers you've selected.

VMware Client? To be clear about the area you are unable to reach, are you having trouble reaching your ESXi hosts web url - or perhaps the vSphere Client web url? Or are you able to reach those but having trouble logging in?

*also, if vSphere Client you are trying to reach... there is an HTML5 and a "FLEX". Try the HTML5 Because the other one (Flex) requires flash or an Internet Explorer browser.
upload_2019-2-19_23-50-17.png
 
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Gadgetguru

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Dec 17, 2018
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Hi Gadget,

I like those SAS SSDs and controllers you've selected.

VMware Client? To be clear about the area you are unable to reach, are you having trouble reaching your ESXi hosts web url - or perhaps the vSphere Client web url? Or are you able to reach those but having trouble logging in?

*also, if vSphere Client you are trying to reach... there is an HTML5 and a "FLEX". Try the HTML5 Because the other one (Flex) requires flash or an Internet Explorer browser.
View attachment 10484
I don't know what is going on. Trying the host ip. Tried again on my phone and now it won't connect either.

I noticed since adding the Intel card, when booting I get, "not enough space to copy pci option rom". Investigating that, but pulled out the HBA and that message went away.

Network issue still remains. It worked flawlessly before. I'll try going back to 5he HBA and pulling the Intel card. That's the only thing I changed other than booting off a USB stick. Not sure how either would affect network connectivity but you never know. I can get into IPMI however.
 

BennyT

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Dec 1, 2018
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What does the IPMI ikvm remote console display? It should display the ip address of the esxi host once it's booted up fully.
 

Gadgetguru

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Dec 17, 2018
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What does the IPMI ikvm remote console display? It should display the ip address of the esxi host once it's booted up fully.
I don't see it anywhere.

I went into my router and found that it did not show the two server NICs attached.

I removed the HBA, no change.

Removed RAID card, no change.

Remove USB stick and booted into windows off a HDD that is installed. Looked at my router and the two NICs are there.

Then, a light bulb clicks on. I installed ESXi on the thumb drive from a CD... on my computer, not the server. Grab my external CD drive, hook it up to the server, put the ESXi install disk in and an empty thumb drive. Nope, won't boot off the CD. Create another thumb drive with the install and plug that into the server. Boots off that USB stick and I was able to install ESXi on the other stick.

Well slap me silly and call me Sally! Booted off the newly made thumb drive and I'm back in business, everything working again. Sheesh! That's why I called this the Newb Build!
 

Gadgetguru

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Dec 17, 2018
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Ran CDM in a Win 10 VM


CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2018 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : Crystal Dew World
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
* KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2544.331 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1443.808 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 316.232 MB/s [ 77205.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 206.851 MB/s [ 50500.7 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 128.095 MB/s [ 31273.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 96.870 MB/s [ 23649.9 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 21.895 MB/s [ 5345.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 30.617 MB/s [ 7474.9 IOPS]

Test : 1024 MiB [C: 49.1% (19.3/39.4 GiB)] (x2) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2019/02/21 7:32:16
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 17763] (x64)
 
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pricklypunter

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Nov 10, 2015
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Well slap me silly and call me Sally! Booted off the newly made thumb drive and I'm back in business, everything working again. Sheesh! That's why I called this the Newb Build!
Congrats on the progress :)

Whenever I'm not near the box that I am going to boot ESXi on from a USB/ SD card, I just use a copy of VMware Workstation on my desktop and perform the install to the devices that way, easy peasey as they say. I usually do a couple of installs at a time so I have some spares handy, just in case I have a flaky one by the time I get to the server. Often when booting off the CD/ DVD on a server, you'll likely need to go into the BIOS and configure the boot options so you can hit the boot option menu during post to select the drive :)
 
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TeleFragger

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Oct 26, 2016
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I've just started to scratch the surface researching ZFS, ZIL, SLOG, L2ARC. I'll check out Snapraid and Drivepool. Thanks!
I am a lover of Drivepool and the free SSD Optimizer plugin.

what I like about DP is simple.. I'm a windows guy (since dos days) and if I do a freenas box, and it goes down, how do I get my stuff off?!?!?!?!
with DP - it isn't a real raid.. think of it as a file level raid. In addition, you can select FOLDER LEVEL!!!
so example is I have my music just 2x, family photos 4x, data 3x, etc.... you get the picture.
other nice thing is you can throw ANY drives at it. Since it isn't striping them, your good!
Also if my machine goes down, all I have to do is put drives in a new machine and view a hidden folder to get the files off...

also $20... wth.. why not!!!!!!!!!!!!


so I just created a new box as well!!!!

Antec 900 case (has 9x 5.25" drive bays)
corsair w620 ps
gibabyte mobo
i5-6600k
32gb ddr4
2x HP H220 SAS controllers
8x sas to 4 sata ports for 32 sata drives
1 to 4 sata power extenders
6x hot swap 2.5" fit in 5.25" bay with 6x 500gb ssd
6x hot swap 2.5" fit in 5.25" bay with 3x 500gb ssd, 256gb sata, 500gb sata and 1 open slot
2x 4tb wd black
4x 2tb wd black
120gb ssd for O/S
Mellanox 10gb


Server 2019
Drivepool and SSD Optimizer

Pool1
SSD Drivepool - used for zero duplication but keep fast access to file copy from too since 10gb.

SATA Drivepool - 500gb ssd for ssd optimizer - used for multiple file duplication on many drives

so having 10gb copying to a pool has been fast as it caches to the ssd first then copies out; however, the issue was retrieving. Since the files are on spinning sata drives, files have to be retrieved from there thus the ssd pool.

love my setup and going to move it into my production setup at home. old server 2016 with essentials role is now offline.. so my plex server needs a new mapping to the movies....

https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...rt-minimum-sata-card.23331/page-2#post-218781
 

Gadgetguru

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Dec 17, 2018
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So have PLEX running in a Win 10 Pro VM with the RAID 1 10TBs added as a raw drive. Everything is working. Set it up this morning and watching a movie tonight on the TV. Last time I had to redo everything on the old system it took 3 days.

Looked at ownCloud and messed around with it a little bit. Meh, so took a look at Nextcloud which seemed, at least on their website "compare" page, to be better. Except it doesn't run on Windows. Ok, so I'll create a Linux VM and use that. Tried Linux Mint, not happening, so tried Ubuntu. For the love of God, can anything be easy on Linux?! Reminded me why I hate it even though I want to love it. I can't figure it out, going through the documentation, watching videos, everything has to be done in a terminal. I can't get it to do what I want. Why can't they just make a GUI like Windows and in a few clicks a normal person can be set up. Instead, if I'm lucky, in days I might figure out the correct commands to make it work. Nah, ain't nobody got time for that!
 
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BennyT

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Dec 1, 2018
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Sounds like great progress. I'll be creating my plexmediaserver VM next weekend perhaps and moving my library to it. I only have about 500-700GB of music and movies.

I have to agree with you regarding linux as a workstation or navigating with a linux desktop/GUI. I use Linux to run apps and services in background (ie. as a linux server) and my interaction directly in the OS I try to keep to command line only. That's not to say I don't access a linux desktop from time to time. But most of the time I'm at a command prompt in linux. The exception was when I had a job or patch to run from the command line that might run for indeterminate amount of time, I would ssh into the linux server and launch a VNC desktop using vncviewer via xterm so if I have to close my laptop the vnc would keep my command line session alive. I think I'll be able to use vmware workstation as a remote console now instead.

In other words I'm not one who uses linux as a workstation or via GUI desktop. I have friends with convictions similar to Richard Stallman and they have Ubuntu installed on all of their workstations and laptops. I'm not one of those guys. :)
 
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Gadgetguru

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Dec 17, 2018
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So installed and set up Tonido in about 3 minutes on a Windows Server 2019 VM. Maybe not as fancy as the other cloud services but gets the job done. I might still play around with some others. I put the two 3TB drives in a RAID 1 and made that my cloud/share drive. Added it as a raw drive to the Server VM.

Should I throw a graphics card in? I have a GTX 970 and a R9 270 laying around. I've read about issues with the Nvidia cards, having to do some sorcery to get them to work in ESXi and/or using paid for enterprise drivers. On the other hand, looks like AMD cards work just fine. So that would mean I would go with the R9 270, less powerful and about the same max TDP as the 970.
 

Gadgetguru

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Dec 17, 2018
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What's the purpose of a dedicated IPMI network connection? My motherboard has 1x Realtek RTL8201N PHY (dedicated IPMI). So now that I have located my server to the room it will stay in, I've routed three ethernet cables to it, for the 2 NICs and this dedicated IPMI. I don't see any difference compared to not having it connected.

I'd like to upgrade to 10GB SFP+ as soon as I can afford it. I'm also looking at building a security camera system w/ PoE switch, cameras, and a WD purple drive. I've done a little bit of reading here on STH about it.
 
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