Archive post: Homebrew ESXi + Openfiler iSCSI

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))

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)