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dual xeon esxi server specs?

M

meester

Member
Any recommendations? I own two Xeon E5620s, I need the rest of the hardware - case, RAM, nic, motherboard, hard drives/controller, PSU.

I'm looking for low-cost components generally. I would like to put two WinXP VMs on each drive, so low-cost storage would be nice. Plus a file server. Each VM is around 60GB and needs 512MB of RAM, so overall I think 6GB RAM would be ok and maybe four low-capacity SATA drives with another larger one for the file server.
 
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Low-cost and dual-socket boards don't really go together. 😀

ASUS Z8NA-D6C $260 (cheap, ATX)
2x Dynatron T667 2x$35=$70 (if you don't have the stock HSF, need small ones because spacing is tight)
6x Kingston 1GB ECC DDR3 1333 6x$44=$264
Antec Three Hundred $62 (cheap, free shipping, good airflow supports lots of HDDs)
Seasonic S12II 520W $70 (520W is plenty of power for 2 80W TDP chips + HDDS)
Samsung F3 1TB $80 (as many as you want for your storage needs)
Samsung DVD drive $20 (if you need it to load ESX, otherwise don't bother)
Total = $826 with DVD/HSFs and 1 HDD.

The board has dual-Intel GigE NICs onboard, so you don't really need an external one. Also, you can very easily have multiple VM images on one HDD, so you really don't need many HDDs. Larger drives are better value for the money anyway. The only downside to this that I can see is that the mobo might need a BIOS update to support E56XX Xeons.
 
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What ever board you get make sure it has a real raid controller not ich10r and intel based nics. I recommend going for a work station board like super micro products.

The raid on the asus board mfenn listed won't work. unless your not raiding and are only going for one big hard drive.

Esx is not real good with drivers so do your home work or you will have a lot of headaches later.

I have built like 3 new i7 based xeons that worked great with the right hardware and I always use adaptec add on sas cards which are not cheap but I usually have 8 drivers.

Try this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-192-_-Product will still need a raid card thought.
 
jtisgeek said:
What ever board you get make sure it has a real raid controller not ich10r and intel based nics. I recommend going for a work station board like super micro products.

The raid on the asus board mfenn listed won't work. unless your not raiding and are only going for one big hard drive.

Esx is not real good with drivers so do your home work or you will have a lot of headaches later.

I have built like 3 new i7 based xeons that worked great with the right hardware and I always use adaptec add on sas cards which are not cheap but I usually have 8 drivers.

Try this
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...-192-_-Product will still need a raid card thought.
Click to expand...

Eh? The board you suggested has the exact same chips as the one I suggested, except that the ASUS has onboard video, whereas the SuperMicro workstation board you suggested does not. Per the title of the thread, the OP is looking for a server not a workstation. Are you really suggesting that he get a discrete GPU for a server? 🙄

OP was going to a low-end setup, so I don't think he had RAIDed SAS drives in mind.
 
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I wasn't really planning on RAID. I don't have high availability requirements. I figure a backup solution would be a better investment...

I was just looking through the Asus boards, the Z8NA-D6(C) looks pretty good - SSI-EB cases/power are going to cost $$$, right? The other option is eATX

The Z8NA-D6 is more expensive here - £270 (For some reason there's a major stock shortage on dual-socket LGA1366 boards) http://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-Z8NA-D6.../dp/B00237RFME

The Supermicro board is a little cheaper - £250 http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductID=988958

I'm keen on Intel but they don't seem to make an ATX board. I didn't really find any other in-stock ATX dual-socket boards.

Looking at hard drive prices, 250GB is £30, 500GB is £35, and 1TB is £55.

I figured eight VMs on four 250GBs would perform better than eight VMs on two 1TB drive (I assume ESXi can handle multiple SATA drives ok).

I wasn't going to bother with ECC RAM.
 
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meester said:
I wasn't really planning on RAID. I don't have high availability requirements. I figure a backup solution would be a better investment...

I was just looking through the Asus boards, the Z8NA-D6(C) looks pretty good - SSI-EB cases/power are going to cost $$$, right? The other option is eATX

The Z8NA-D6 is more expensive here - £270 (For some reason there's a major stock shortage on dual-socket LGA1366 boards) http://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-Z8NA-D6.../dp/B00237RFME

The Supermicro board is a little cheaper - £250 http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebProductID=988958

I'm keen on Intel but they don't seem to make an ATX board. I didn't really find any other in-stock ATX dual-socket boards.

Looking at hard drive prices, 250GB is £30, 500GB is £35, and 1TB is £55.

I figured eight VMs on four 250GBs would perform better than eight VMs on two 1TB drive (I assume ESXi can handle multiple SATA drives ok).

I wasn't going to bother with ECC RAM.
Click to expand...

For your use, of course get an ATX board like the ASUS I suggested. The SM board is not cheaper when you figure that you have to get an add-in video card for it.

ESXi will handle as many HDDs as you can throw at it. As for the performance, depends on what you're doing. Heavy random access, sure, more spindles are better. Anything else, the 1TB drives are better because they are faster drives and you can be more flexible with your provisioning. Then you have to as yourself if 125GB (1/2 of a 250GB drive) enough for your file server.

Be careful with the memory. Dual socket boards and CPUs can be very picky. I suggested the ECC memory because I am confident that it will work.

Oh yeah, you really should update your location to indicate that you are in the UK, because that is a game-changer for a lot of things.
 
mfenn said:
For your use, of course get an ATX board like the ASUS I suggested. The SM board is not cheaper when you figure that you have to get an add-in video card for it.

ESXi will handle as many HDDs as you can throw at it. As for the performance, depends on what you're doing. Heavy random access, sure, more spindles are better. Anything else, the 1TB drives are better because they are faster drives and you can be more flexible with your provisioning. Then you have to as yourself if 125GB (1/2 of a 250GB drive) enough for your file server.
Click to expand...

Regarding the file server I was thinking like 4 * 250GB for the VMs and 1 * 1TB for the file server. I assume mixed drives is no problem...

I actually have a pair of Samsung HD103UJ terabyte drives in my desktop at the moment (running Win2008), which I'm going to rebuild as a Win7 machine. One of the drives is not even in use, so I could rip both those out and replace them with an SSD and then move them over to the server, seeing as I should move my data onto there.

Damn things are still so expensive.... Kingston V-Series runs to £200 for 128GB, which is not too bad.
 
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meester said:
Regarding the file server I was thinking like 4 * 250GB for the VMs and 1 * 1TB for the file server. I assume mixed drives is no problem...

I actually have a pair of Samsung HD103UJ terabyte drives in my desktop at the moment (running Win2008), which I'm going to rebuild as a Win7 machine. One of the drives is not even in use, so I could rip both those out and replace them with an SSD and then move them over to the server, seeing as I should move my data onto there.

Damn things are still so expensive.... Kingston V-Series runs to £200 for 128GB, which is not too bad.



Hmm, I set that now, it doesn't seem very conspicuous though.
Click to expand...

Mixing drives of various capacities is not a problem, in fact, I believe that the newer versions of ESX can use VMFS locally and pool the storage from all of the drives. Since you have a free drive, I would probably start off just using that and seeing how it goes. You can always add more spindles later.
 
Judging from your requirements, I'd just sell the two Xeons and choose a low-end Dell server. The T110 is about $350 with 4 GB and the T310 is about $600. I've used both of these. Note that these can only handle four SATA hard drives.
 
RebateMonger said:
Judging from your requirements, I'd just sell the two Xeons and choose a low-end Dell server. The T110 is about $350 with 4 GB and the T310 is about $600. I've used both of these. Note that these can only handle four SATA hard drives.
Click to expand...

I only just bought them... I plan to use them for CPU-intensive simultaneous processing. I'm not bothered about the cost so much as not wanting to spend money on things that are useless to me like remote monitoring and dual PSUs.
 
mfenn said:
Eh? The board you suggested has the exact same chips as the one I suggested, except that the ASUS has onboard video, whereas the SuperMicro workstation board you suggested does not. Per the title of the thread, the OP is looking for a server not a workstation. Are you really suggesting that he get a discrete GPU for a server? 🙄

OP was going to a low-end setup, so I don't think he had RAIDed SAS drives in mind.
Click to expand...

Yeah didn't see it had no on-board video i just recommend it cause I have used that board before. I don't trust asus for any sever or work station build but that's just me.

With this kind of hardware there is no reason to not get ecc . Op sounds likes he doesn't know if he wants a sever or a workstation or just a nice machine he can put vm's on. If you go with single drives your good your only limited to 2tb per volume but that doesn't sound like much of a issue. What kinda file are you severing since there's no raid or fault torrance just don't be mad when you lose stuff when the one drive dies that had you whole vm and data. To be frank your just building a half-ass dual cpu machine.
 
jtisgeek said:
Yeah didn't see it had no on-board video i just recommend it cause I have used that board before. I don't trust asus for any sever or work station build but that's just me.

With this kind of hardware there is no reason to not get ecc . Op sounds likes he doesn't know if he wants a sever or a workstation or just a nice machine he can put vm's on. If you go with single drives your good your only limited to 2tb per volume but that doesn't sound like much of a issue. What kinda file are you severing since there's no raid or fault torrance just don't be mad when you lose stuff when the one drive dies that had you whole vm and data. To be frank your just building a half-ass dual cpu machine.
Click to expand...


RAID is for availability not data integrity, something which isn't too big a deal to me.

Files are only my MP3s and stuff.
 
Ok I am nearly ready with my order:

2 x Intel BXSTS100C HSF = £43
Antec Three Hundred = £40
Antec BP550Plus £50
Lite-on SATA DVD drive £14
2 * Xeon 5620 CPU £539
1 * Samsung HD103UJ 1TB drive, but I will probably add a second depending on how performance is looking
Asus Z8NA-D6 £270

RAM is my only question, I can either do:
6 * KVR1333D3S8R9S 1GB @ £210
or
4 * KVR1333D3D8R9S 2GB @ £202

I'm slightly concerned about filling all the slots for only 6GB; the 2GB units would allow me to go up to 12GB in the future, only concern is the effect of having two slots rather than three on performance. Is it major?

(total cost approx. £1150, or around £300 less than the Dell T410 server)
 
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meester said:
Ok I am nearly ready with my order:

2 x Intel BXSTS100C HSF = £43
Antec Three Hundred = £40
Antec BP550Plus £50
Lite-on SATA DVD drive £14
2 * Xeon 5620 CPU £539
1 * Samsung HD103UJ 1TB drive, but I will probably add a second depending on how performance is looking
Asus Z8NA-D6 £270

RAM is my only question, I can either do:
6 * KVR1333D3S8R9S 1GB @ £210
or
4 * KVR1333D3D8R9S 2GB @ £202

I'm slightly concerned about filling all the slots for only 6GB; the 2GB units would allow me to go up to 12GB in the future, only concern is the effect of having two slots rather than three on performance. Is it major?
Click to expand...

Looks good! WRT the RAM, the CPUs will be in dual-channel mode instead of triple channel mode if you go with 4x2GB. That will decrease the memory bandwidth. The performance implications of that really depend on whether or not your app is sensitive to memory bandwidth. Most applications are not, so we're talking about a 1-2% difference. Of course, if you're running SuperPI or something, then yes, you will see a big hit.
 
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