Posts Tagged ‘diy’

  • 23 Dec

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    Archive post: Homebrew ESXi + Openfiler iSCSI

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    finally got our home (office) brewed stor­age (open­filer iscsi) into the dat­a­cen­tre, to max­imise the dell r805 server.
    Decent specs: HP DL380G3
    • 2 x 3.2ghz xeon
    • 12 gb ram (yes, i know, overkill)
    • 6 x scsi 73gb (1 x ESXi instal­la­tion, 5 x raid 5)
    Dell R805 server, nice specs for ESXi server, but the local stor­age is limited.
    • 2 x sas (put them in raid 1, and it’s 136gb max)
    with open­filer hooked into it ( 2 x cat6 cross cable), the addi­tional 256gb makes it much more flex­i­ble. (8 cpu cores, 8gb ram (upgrad­able to 32gb))

    obser­va­tions:

    we had a guest win2k3 std server (run­ning mssql 2k), it was report­ing high cpu usage, peri­od­i­cally.
    once the shared stor­age went in, the cpu % has been more nor­mal.
    it is likely due to low hard­disk (for esxi swap) and over­all mem­ory used. (more mem­ory needed = more swaps = more cpu usage)

     

  • 23 Dec

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    Archive post: Cheap and quiet solution for a test/local network ESXi Server

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    was read­ing the article:  “Cheap and quiet solu­tion for a home-based ESX Server” [url]

    gonna give my props to HP work­sta­tion xw4000; we have got­ten 3 units.

    • 4GB ram
    • intel core 2 duo (6300 @ 1.8ghz)
    • 4 x sata drives
    • 1 x Broad­com NetX­treme BCM5755 Giga­bit (onboard)
    • dual head nvidia quadro
    • Win XP Pro

    ESXi 3.5 U2/ Open­filer v2.3 installs out of the box.  for a low cheap price of < S$600.

    and it runs so quiet.…

    We have ESXi run­ning on one of the machines, another one is run­ning XP Pro (with VM Work­sta­tion, run­ning a vir­tu­alised copy of Domain con­troller (win2k server). 3rd machine is a standby machine for a client’s project (part of support/ maintenance)

    and com­ing soon, an exter­nal esxi + open­filer machine, to look up to the ESXi server as shared storage.