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Need help to setup home lab for VMware Esx5

V

virtualadda

Junior Member
1. PC Function/Use: My motto is to have a home lab and learn various features of Citrix, Microsoft & VMware products. I will not be running all products at a time, Ex: System OS ESXi5, Guest OS two Esx, two Win 2008 server(AD, XenApp/XenDesktop), Win XP).
2. Budget: ~ Rs-40k($770 apprx)🙁
3. Country: India, Bengaluru aka Bangalore
4. Brand Prefs: Intel, AMD, Asus, Transcend, Crosair, Coolermaster, kingston.
5. Parts: I have three 80GB SATA HDD 3Gbps would use the same for this new configuration.
6. Search/Read Threads: Vm-help, Anandtech, Vmware communities.
7. Overclock: Not initially, later will see.
9. When: Within Jan'12

Any chance of decrease in hardware price by Jan'12?:\


CPU: Thinking of AMD FX-8150 or Intel i5 2500
Since i will be using the system for virtualization, would prefer to have most of the Virtualization support in CPU like VT-x/AMD-V, VT-D/IOMMU, 64bit, intel EPT

MB: Looking under Asur or Intel

RAM: 16GB thinking of Crosair

Power Supply: Crosair or Cooler Master

Case: Cooler Master
PHP:

SSD HDD: 64GB thinking of Crosair or OCZ

Suggest modifications???
 
If you're not running all those OSes at once, then you don't need 8 threads. I suggest an i5-2400.

I would get a single, large (500GB-1TB) HDD in place of that SSD. If you plan to install all those guest OSes, then you need space more than you need speed.

And just to be clear, don't buy a "Crosair", or an "Asur", just like you wouldn't buy a "Rolox" watch. Corsair and Asus, on the other hand, are fine brands.
 
Depending on what he will be doing in his labs the SSD (or even multiple SSDs) might be better than one single spindle disk. As a best practice, when you get several machines hitting one disk, IO can get bad. But again it depends on what you will be doing with them.
 
Though i wouldn't run all Os's at once, i will run atleast 2 ESX, 2 Win 2008, 2 XP at once.

i have three 80GB SATA 7200RPM HDD, i beleive that is sufficient, Guess OS and additional softwares doesn't cross more than 7GB for each Virtual Machine. Imagine if i have two ESX, two Windows 2008 server and one Xp client, the total space occupied 35GB Max. But i fear about the performance impact on the machines, any experience on that?

Sorry for the spell mistake.. indeed i meant Corsair and Asus.

Suggest a PSU and MB (should support VT-x/AMD-V, VT-D/IOMMU, 64bit, intel EPT)?

I am still thinking on SSD.
 
What Paperlantern is saying is that the capacity isn't really the big deal, it's performance (IOPS) available on each drive. You can certainly get up and running just fine with some old 80GB HDDs, but you won't have very good performance. That might or might not matter though, depending on what you are doing.

Also, an i5 2500 is probably overkill for a lab machine, I run my home ESXi server on an i3 2100 and have absolutely no issues. Generally speaking, a virtualization box needs three things (in rough priority order)

1. Lots of memory
2. Fast disk subsystem
3. Lots of network connectivity

Notice what isn't on this list? Any vaguely modern CPU will support the hardware virtualization features that you need and the mobo doesn't matter insofar as it doesn't impact the other aspects.

Not knowing Indian prices, here's what I would do for $770:

i5 2300 $150
ASUS or Intel H67 board $80
16GB DDR3 1333 $80
Dual-port Intel server NIC $100
Corsair, XFX, Antec ~400W PSU $50
Some decent ATX case $50

That's about $510. Spend the rest on as many 7200 RPM drives as you can afford. Set those each up as different storage pools within ESXi. If you will be playing with ESXi 5 Enterprise or higher, you can play with Storage DRS to automatically shift load among them.
 
Mfenn i agree we need drive performance.

My plan is to have Physical host with OS ESXi5, on this two or more ESX5 server VM's with combination of Hyper-V or Citrix environment. So totally say we have another two Windows server 2008 VM's and a Windows7 VM's. Now tell me running these are possible by i5 2300?? will i get a good performance on CPU end??? i know HardDisk also plays major role here 😉 what if i use 60GB SSD harddisk?? i guess the performance will be fine.
 
Notice what isn't on this list? Any vaguely modern CPU will support the hardware virtualization features that you need and the mobo doesn't matter insofar as it doesn't impact the other aspects.
Click to expand...

I don't fully agree with that. Thread count does matter. I can run 9 VMs on my e3-1230 before the CPU becomes maxed out, and additional VMs will result in slowdowns. I can only run 4 VMs on i3-540 before the same thing happens.

I don't know why the e3-1230 can run 9 using 8 threads before becoming maxed out. I've tweaked both systems to be the same (the i3-540 is even overclocked to 4.2ghz while the e3-1230 runs 3.2ghz stock) and it just happens to be like that. Maybe it's because I'm using the integrated graphics on the i3, which I guess could contribute to CPU usage? Or maybe it's just because Sandy Bridge is better? Either way, for what I am doing, 1 CPU thread = 1 VM.

e3-1230 is a cheap is gets for 8 threads on the Intel side of things. If you're looking for integrated graphics, you'll want the 1235 which is $25 more, but you're probably better off finding something like a cheap dedicated card. I went with a passive HD 6450 which I got for $20 AR.

Oh, and definitely get a SSD. You can pile all the VMs onto it, and not have the performance issues that happen if you share just one on a regular mechanical drive. When users report a SSD being better than their old mechanical drive... it's nothing compared to how much an improvement SSDs are in virtual boxes.
 
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Personally for this sort of work, and for general learning, I'd suggest you build your own SAN/NAS. And then disklessly boot the box that you're going to be doing all the 'home lab' stuff on, through either the Intel iSCSI initiator, or gPXE/iPXE.

If you want to be competent at virtualization, you'll need to be competent with working with iSCSI anyways. And its far easier to work with iSCSI images in the virtualization environment, than work with disks in individual machines, etc.

A RAID-1 / RAID-10 for a SAN server can be extremely fast as well. I disklessly boot Win7 and Linux clients over iSCSI from a RAID-10 with 2Tb 7200rpm disks, and with 16gb of RAM on the iSCSI server, there's a huge amount of caching which makes everything feel very fast. I doubt there's many people out there who could tell the difference between my Gig-E mechanical iSCSI storage, and a SSD, in terms of the end user experience.

I know this breaks the budget, but storage management and working with virtualized storage is often just as important as the CPU virtualization itself. And iSCSI allows you to keep everything isolated -- so you don't have to worry that non-software-mounted disks will get 'clobbered' by a bad install, if they're not iSCSI-mounted in the first place!
 
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njdevilsfan87 said:
I don't fully agree with that. Thread count does matter. I can run 9 VMs on my e3-1230 before the CPU becomes maxed out, and additional VMs will result in slowdowns. I can only run 4 VMs on i3-540 before the same thing happens.

I don't know why the e3-1230 can run 9 using 8 threads before becoming maxed out. I've tweaked both systems to be the same (the i3-540 is even overclocked to 4.2ghz while the e3-1230 runs 3.2ghz stock) and it just happens to be like that. Maybe it's because I'm using the integrated graphics on the i3, which I guess could contribute to CPU usage? Or maybe it's just because Sandy Bridge is better? Either way, for what I am doing, 1 CPU thread = 1 VM.
Click to expand...

Bolded the critical part of the post. For the vast vast majority of virtualized workloads you will be oversubscribing CPUs like crazy. In a lab environment, you will definitely not be maxing out a dual-core on any kind of sustained basis until you get into the double-digit numbers of VMs. You'll of course run into memory and IOPS limitations long before that point.
 
pitz said:
If you want to be competent at virtualization, you'll need to be competent with working with iSCSI anyways.
Click to expand...

<completely off topic>Pssh, FibreChannel for ever! When you need your SAN to just work, you go FC.</completely off topic>
 
I don't have much budget to use separate SAN/NAS.

Check the out the below processor comparison link.
http://ark.intel.com/compare/52274,52273,52271,52213

I don't need a GPU in CPU, since i don't use the system for entertainment. I believe onboard motherboard graphic is sufficient.

Can i use non ECC RAM on for E-xxx series processor? i know ECC RAM are costlier.. will there be any performance impact for using non ECC RAM?

I believe CPU E-1230 is best option considering my budget and MB S1200BTL.
 
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Yes, you can use non-ECC RAM no problem. It will perform the same, you just obviously won't have error correcting memory. Don't get "gamer" memory for a workstation/server board though, stick to normal DDR3 1333 1.5V.
 
I had chat with Intel support team, they said MB S1200BTL supports only ECC RAM. Also checked the spec's of MB found it doesn't support non ECC RAM. So confused!!! :S

Are you also using S1200BTL MB for E3-1230 processor?

Need help to choose a Case for MB S1200BTL, normal ATX Case works?

Are you/Can we use single 8GB RAM module?

Did you try Hyper-V on this server config?
 
Yes, the board is just normal ATX. I don't think that it will boot with just a single DIMM, but that shouldn't be a problem because 2x4GB is better cost per gig than a single 8GB DIMM anyway. Memory support is a function of the CPU and the Xeon E3's definitely support non-ECC memory.

HOWEVER, please do not spend a lot of money on a server board for this project. A $100 H67 will work just fine.
 
Oh ok that's great!!

Thank you very much for the suggestion 🙂, it saved $100 for me i can use it for SSD. Can you please specify a H67 MB exact model? does this chipset supports all the features of E3-1230 processor? like VT-x, VT-d, HT, Turbo Boost etc.

Have you tried Microsoft Hyper-V with these configration?
 
I use the TH67+, which runs $75-$100. I chose it because it was one of the few Micro ATX boards that I found which had 4x RAM slots, for a 4x4GB configuration. Even though Xeons are not officially supported on mainstream platforms, any H67 board should work. Some may require bios updates, but mine worked out of the box. And yes H67 supports HT, VT-x, VT-d, and etc.

But just remember if you get the e3-1230, you need to get a low end graphics card with it. If you want integrated graphics, you'll need to get the e3-1235.
 
Thank you.. but i guess motherboard will have onboard graphics will it not help? On googling i see H67 chipset doesn't support vt-d, any info about support?
 
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Check out this link http://downloadmirror.intel.com/19707/eng/Q67_vPro_Guide.pdf

page6 says "Intel Desktop Boards DQ67SW, DQ67EP and DQ67OW support the Intel&#174; Core&#8482; i3, Intel&#174; Core&#8482; i5, Intel&#174; Core&#8482; i7, and Intel&#174; Xeon&#174; E3 processor families in the LGA1155 package."

Comparison of all above 3 motherboards with Xeon E3-1230
http://ark.intel.com/compare/51997,51999,51998,52812,52807,52274,52273,52271,52213

Does intel H67 boards supports VT-d? i don't see any documentation on the same
frown.gif
For intel q67 boards product docs clearly specifies it has vt-d, vt-x but i don't see HT. Can you please help me in clarifying?

The below doc says dq67Ow supports HT but VT-d, VT-x details are missing
frown.gif


http://www.intel.de/content/dam/doc/product-brief/desktop-board-dq67ow-executive-brief.pdf
 
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I don't use VT-d so I have no idea. But you may need to go with a Q chipset in that case... Even though I have VT-d listed in the bios, whether or not it works is a different story, that of which I do not know.
 
njdevilsfan87 said:
I use the TH67+, which runs $75-$100. I chose it because it was one of the few Micro ATX boards that I found which had 4x RAM slots, for a 4x4GB configuration. Even though Xeons are not officially supported on mainstream platforms, any H67 board should work. Some may require bios updates, but mine worked out of the box. And yes H67 supports HT, VT-x, VT-d, and etc.

But just remember if you get the e3-1230, you need to get a low end graphics card with it. If you want integrated graphics, you'll need to get the e3-1235.
Click to expand...

:thumbsup: to this. Great cheap board IMHO.

OP, don't worry about VT-d, motherboard support is only one aspect of it. You do not have any peripherals (high-end network and storage controllers) that can take advantage of that support anyway.
 
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