[ShabazKillaX]

Since virtualization is all the rage right now (and rightfully so) I'm planning on building an ESX lab at home to prepare for the VMWare Certified Professional exam. If anyone is unfamiliar with ESX, it is VMWare's bare metal hypervisor - i.e. it runs directly on the system hardware, not on top of another OS. If you want to know more check out the Wikipedia article:

VMware ESX Server - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The thing with ESX is that it has very limited driver support. Luckily there are several sites that list unofficial hardware that works with ESX. Also for some of the more advanced features like VMotion and HA you need a SAN (storage area network). Thankfully there are open source solutions for this. I'm planning on using Openfiler which is based on rpath linux. It allows you to configure local storage as iSCSI SAN storage.

Overall I'm planning on spending about $3k for the lab. It should be able to run about 20 VMs concurrently without breaking a sweat. The VM Hosts will have quad core cpus and 8 gigs of ram. The Openfiler box will have 1tb of storage for VMs (4 x 500gb in RAID 10). The other advantage to the lab is that I can use it to create VMs to study for other certifications as well. I can create an Exchange 2007 cluster, Windows 2008 domain, etc. without needing to drop any additional coin on hardware.



Does anyone else on here work with VMWare products or any other virtualization software (Xen, Hyper-V, etc)?

[ShabazKillaX]

50 views and 0 comments... No one here uses VMWare or is interested in virtualization?

[demonizeZ]

I really don't know much about it but a friend of mine who is IT admin for a collage they got server running in virtual. He told me the hardware for those stuff is dam expensive but the software is so good that you can tell how much of Mhz you want for individual servers.

They implemented virtualization tech. because they can run multiple server from one system. Back in days the Processor barely use to get use in servers. But now with virtual they can use processors to its full.

[XEN]

I've used VMWare on several occasions for running OSX on a PC, as well as a DOS machine for some vintage games. That setup looks pretty cool, what interface is the crossover?

[SoulAssassin]

Let me know how this goes. I just was thinking about doing the same with sbs 2k8 coming out this year because I put sbs2k8 on my main vista box and due to the requirements of sbs it's killing me.

[DrX]

Wow, 3K for a nice setup!!.....don't you need something like 5K to sign up for VM's certification class? We have a couple of guys at my work that are VCP certified, and our company paid for them to go to the course/exam (I think it's a couple days long), and it was a couple grand.....and you HAVE to go that route to get the VCP certification I believe...

[ShabazKillaX]

Originally Posted by XEN

I've used VMWare on several occasions for running OSX on a PC, as well as a DOS machine for some vintage games. That setup looks pretty cool, what interface is the crossover?

Gigabit

[ShabazKillaX]

Originally Posted by DrX

Wow, 3K for a nice setup!!.....don't you need something like 5K to sign up for VM's certification class? We have a couple of guys at my work that are VCP certified, and our company paid for them to go to the course/exam (I think it's a couple days long), and it was a couple grand.....and you HAVE to go that route to get the VCP certification I believe...

Yep, the class is 5k and is required for the certification. My work should be picking up the cost of the class.

[Jamsan]

That's some good information you provided. I was unaware of the OpenFiler option for simulating iSCSI SAN storage, so that will make it easier to test out the HA/VMotion stuff without dropping major dollars on an actual iSCSI SAN (or using the production ones at work ).

The only reccomendation I would make is to have a 3rd host server. You could use it to either test the DRS stuff or test out the Site Recovery Manager piece. Not sure if OpenFiler supports replication, but if it did, it'd make things much more interesting.

We haven't used much of VMWare at work. I've played with VMWare Server a bit, but performance is a bit lacking running on top of Windows. We'll probably start using ESXi soon for some dev/non-critical prod servers to get our feet wet, before we jump into VI3.

[ShabazKillaX]

Well, I started ordering equipment tonight for the storage server. Most of it was ordered from Newegg with the RAID controller coming from Ebay. I'm also rolling in an upgrade to my file/media server into this project. I'm planning on virtualizing that server and moving it's data storage to the SAN.

Case: Lian Li PC-V2000BPIIWC
PS: Corsair 650W
Motherboard: ASUS P5K Pro
CPU: Intel Core2Quad Q6600
Memory: G.Skill 4GB (2x2GB) PC2 6400 X 2
Hard Drives:
OS/Apps: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB x 2 in RAID1
VM Storage: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB x 4 in RAID10
Media Storage: Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB x 4 in RAID5
RAID Controller: Dell PERC5i (PCIe - 8 SATA drives)
Additional NICs: Intel EXPI9300PTBLK PCIe Gigabit NIC
Video Card: Generic PCI POS

This will give me ~1TB for VMs and ~3TB for media storage. If I need to add additional storage I can add a second PERC5i card and add two 5-in-3 drive cages to support 8 additional drives.

I plan on ordering the rest of the equipment tomorrow.

[ShabazKillaX]

Originally Posted by Jamsan

That's some good information you provided. I was unaware of the OpenFiler option for simulating iSCSI SAN storage, so that will make it easier to test out the HA/VMotion stuff without dropping major dollars on an actual iSCSI SAN (or using the production ones at work ).

The only reccomendation I would make is to have a 3rd host server. You could use it to either test the DRS stuff or test out the Site Recovery Manager piece. Not sure if OpenFiler supports replication, but if it did, it'd make things much more interesting.

We haven't used much of VMWare at work. I've played with VMWare Server a bit, but performance is a bit lacking running on top of Windows. We'll probably start using ESXi soon for some dev/non-critical prod servers to get our feet wet, before we jump into VI3.

VMWare server runs a lot better on Linux. Not as good as bare metal, but a huge improvement over Windows. Now that ESXi is free I bet a lot more people will start playing with it in dev environments. Kind of took the wind out of Hyper-V's sails.

[Jamsan]

Originally Posted by ShabazKillaX

VMWare server runs a lot better on Linux. Not as good as bare metal, but a huge improvement over Windows. Now that ESXi is free I bet a lot more people will start playing with it in dev environments. Kind of took the wind out of Hyper-V's sails.

Completely agree with you. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about Linux to troubleshoot it quickly if there is a problem, so running VMWare Server on a Linux OS was out of the question, even for dev servers.

[ShabazKillaX]

Ok, I ordered the rest of the gear.

2 Dell PowerConnect 2716 gigabit switches (1 for LAN, 1 for Storage network)

Case: Silverstone SUGO case x 2
PS: Antec Earthwatts 380W power supply x 2
Motherboard: Intel BOXDQ35JOE Q35 motheroard x 2
CPU: Intel Quad2Core Q6600x 2
Memory: G.Skill 4GB (2 x 2GB) PC2-6400 x 4
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 250GB x 2
NICs: Intel EXPI9300PTBLK PCIe gigabit x 4
Intel PWLA8391GT PCI gigabit x 2

[ShabazKillaX]

Update: I've got all the hardware assembled - pics coming soon. The Lian-Li case is a thing of beautiful. I'm using a small wire shelving unit as a rack to hold the ESX host systems, the switches and another system I have. Overall it looks pretty good.

I installed OpenFiler and am configuring it now. Just finishing setting up the iSCSI targets. So far this has been the biggest headache though. The web front end has a ton of bugs. I setup the storage network interfaces through it and it ended up writing incorrect data to the config files. The same thing happened when I setup the NIC bonding - instead of setting "MODE=4" in the modprobe.conf it set it to "Mode=802.3ad" which is what MODE 4 is, but still it's a typo. I'm hoping that the updates I installed fix some of these annoyances.

I've also got ESX installed on one host. That install went surprisingly well considering I'm running it on completely unsupported hardware.

[ShabazKillaX]

Update with Pics:


Well, I've got everything up and running. So far I've spun up 4 VMs and everything is working great. I could not get the NIC bonding on the storage server working in 802.3ad mode so I switched to another mode and it works great. Just working on converting some VMWare server VMs to ESX right now.

Lab


Networking gear


Storage Server


Internal shot of storage server


Hard Drives a plenty


Front of storage server


ESX Hosts

[ShabazKillaX]

Oh, I went a little crazy with the label maker...

[ShabazKillaX]

Here are some screen shots from the VI Client:

[gB dAvId x]

You SUCK! What is your job?

[ShabazKillaX]

Originally Posted by gB dAvId x

You SUCK! What is your job?

Right now my title is SharePoint Administrator. Should be getting changed to Enterprise Systems Architect sometime soon.

[Bear]

Nice setup. Let us know how your electric bill fairs out