Server Part Selection & General VMWare ESXi Questions
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robodude666 Member |
Hey gang, I am currently using a small 4x drive NAS for my storage (media, backups, etc.) needs. While I love the little sucker, I am going to run out of disk space within the coming months. Rather than just upgrading to larger disks I have been pondering the idea of replacing it entirely with a VMWare ESXi box that\'ll run FreeNAS for my storage needs, as well as a web, SVN, and other misc. servers for web development purposes. The system won\'t be mission critical, as it will be for my personal use. I\'m aware I can run a simple FreeNAS server, and run web/SVN on my local machine, but thought it would be fun to use VMWare ESXi as I\'ve been interested in it for some time now -- plus the experience wouldn\'t hurt. I would like to keep the budget to a minimum, and was wondering what people thought would be important components to focus on. I would like to maximize storage whilst a) most importantly, minimizing power consumption and b) secondarily, minimizing the cost. I can easily go with a cheap Celeron processor, etc. but seeing as I\'ve never worked with VMWare ESXi before I am unsure what kind of performance it would yield. In addition, would the lower performance of the Western Digital Green 1TB HDDs (compared to the Black or Raid-Edition series) be worth the 20-50% lower power consumption and lower cost? I was also wondering whether or not I should invest in a RAID card that has more ports than I currently require. I will start off with 4-6 drives, and potentially add more in the future as diskspace runs low. I know VMWare ESXi doesn\'t have all of the fancy vMotion and other technologies which make moving VMs a breeze, so is the money saved by buying a RAID controller with just enough ports worth the headache (potentially) of moving the VMDKs and recreating the VMs when upgrading RAID cards? As a general VMWare ESXi question, if I use the built-in BIOS/online expansion of the Areca, or other RAID cards, to add more disks to a RAID 5 or 6 array would there be any issues within VMWare ESXi for increasing the size of a datastore, or increasing the amount of space allocated to a particular VM? Hopefully, in a non-destructive way i.e not losing data. And lastly, also as a general question, is using VMWare ESXi, on a newly purchased (custom) system, as a solution to replace a small NAS an "overkill" upgrade? Cheers, -robodude666 |
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| Posts: 1 Country:  United states of americaDate: 16-01-2010 19:12 |
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Replys's
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analog_ Member |
Afaik VMFS3 supports adding free disk space to a filesystem. They call it an \'extend\'. Instead of using VMFS3 with an huge VMDK file on it you could use raw disk devices (since your not doing vmotion anyway). I recommend raw devices over the conventional solution because otherwise you get stuck in an closed source filesystem for which there is no linux/windows read/write driver. So it\'s easier to recover your data if you decide later on to ditch ESX(i). You\'ll only need to find a motherboard which offers enough sata ports or buy an el-cheapo s-ata card (without raid). Here\'s an example which might suit your needs which offers 5 or 6 s-ata ports (not sure): http://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/view_message/33340189 |
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Posts: 6 Country:  BelgiumDate: 25-01-2010 18:17 |
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