Comments for TekiNerd™

Comment on At Home with VMware ESXi by tinkererguy

tinkererguy — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 06:18:22 +0000

Matt, some video cards may work with vmdirectpath (passthrough), so it may be possible to achieve what you’re trying to do.

I tested MSI and ASRock Z68 motherboards with the Intel Core i7 2600 (not the 2600k), and they work with passthrough (I’m using it for USB 3.0 passthrough to format the 5TB external RAID as one big NTFS lump, getting around 2TB virtual drive size limits of ESXi 5.0).

Comment on Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) by tekinerd

tekinerd — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 02:37:43 +0000

In theory yes, though I’ve only played with dual Linux implementations. Each half looks just like an X86 server motherboard, each having access to the disks in the front section if SAS enabled. Now we have 10G LAN/iSCSI/FCoE controllers as the primary host side connection, dual blade servers in SBB certainly seem to make your 2008 cluster far more feasible.

The limitations are that you have to live with whatever RAID or SAS I/O controller they’ve integrated as you usually have no PCIe slots to play with. I’ve seen LSI’s 6G SAS IOC on some boards as well as PMC’s RAID controller in recent designs which are fine for JBOD server implementations.

Comment on Storage Bridge Bay (SBB) by Dan

Dan — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 12:34:32 +0000

Will a SBB chassis like Supermicro offers work in a Windows 2008 cluster for HA storage ?

This would be a game changer for me and reduce costs. If I could offer one box that is HA and only requires Windows that would be ideal.

Comment on At Home with VMware ESXi by Amareh swain

Amareh swain — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 16:27:06 +0000

Very nice writeup. very clear step by step guide. it really helped. Thanks a lot.

Comment on SSD Caching versus Tiering by SSD Tiering versus Caching: Part 2 | TekiNerd™

SSD Tiering versus Caching: Part 2 | TekiNerd™ — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 18:04:55 +0000

[...] that emerged from the show I’m glad to say matched what we described in our earlier blog (SSD Caching versus Tiering): caching makes a copy of frequently accessed data from a hard drive and places it in the SSD for [...]

Comment on At Home with VMware ESXi by tekinerd

tekinerd — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 04:27:07 +0000

Matt, if I’ve understood your question correctly, then 8G should be enough but you may have issues with running any specialist video peripherals under VMware ESXi unless they come with specific VMware drivers. I haven’t researched this, but I’m not sure if tv tuners are even supported in ESXi… so definitely do your homework before pushing forward with a virtualization project involving multimedia especially.

Comment on At Home with VMware ESXi by tekinerd

tekinerd — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 04:07:18 +0000

Yes you can move your OS to new hardware. I’ve been using the free VMware convertor utility for this which allows you to copy your virtual OS to another virtual server or workstation environment so long as it’s another VMware system. I’ll try to post something on this soon and my experiences.

VMware uses it’s own file system, so once you create a Windows OS as a virtual machine on top of ESXi, it’s no longer compatible as it uses VMFS vs NTFS. You’d have to run the conversion utility to transfer data or simply copy over the network to a standard NTFS drive.

I may be wrong here but an alternative if you want to retain NTFS compatibility may be to use Microsoft’s standalone HyperV hypervisor. Haven’t played with this too much yet so not sure how transferable this would be.

Comment on At Home with VMware ESXi by Matt

Matt — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 13:03:18 +0000

As a noob to this, is the 8GB RAM ok if you are only running WHS2011 under ESXi 4.1 for future upgradability of hardware, or more RAM, or will it not help in moving the server to a new hardware much later down the road?

Note: I brought an – AsRock Z68 Fatal1ty Professional Gen3, Core i5 2500k and 8 GB RAM, WHS 2011, will be buying some TV tuner cards soon as I find out more about the BG 3460..

If I did later change my mind and end up running other things such as gaming servers (BF3), or find the media capability’s in WHS2011 to be not enough and use Windows 7 for media, or want to separate utorrent… would 8GB physical RAM be ok (seen as many say WHS2011 barely ever uses the MAX amount of 8BG)??

Thanks for your thoughts, hope I am not hijacking this thread in any way…

Comment on At Home with VMware ESXi by Matt

Matt — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 12:20:00 +0000

I am new to this WHS and Virtualisation of OS’s, but am thinking a WHS2011 under ESXi 4.1 would be great for the restoring of the system on new hardware, have you tried this yet? And how easy was it?

Also how does ESXi/ virtualisation effect data on the disk, will it still be formatted as NTFS, i.e. can I remove the drive and put it in another machine and see all my info, this is probably the only area of Virilisation haven’t found any solid info on in my search??

Comment on At Home with VMware ESXi by tekinerd

tekinerd — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 23:48:59 +0000

So far, I’ve gotten away with doing a copy of the entire VM and its data set to my local desktop (can take a long time if your network is slow), then uploading to the new location – a poor man’s vmotion. I’ve also had a lot of success using the free VMware vSphere Convertor Standalone tool to convert and “migrate” VMs between machines, including moving a VM Player Fedora Core Linux machine to my ESXi server which worked perfectly. This takes a long time however as its all copy based.

For shared storage, I have a very low cost DIY iSCSI shared storage system based on the free Linux based OpenFiler (see same article) running on a spare PC box. It’s been running with no issue since I set it up and has a reasonably good management capability, and being iSCSI/Ethernet based is visible to all my home network machines (though it’s only hooked up to my ESXi server). It can get a little overtaxed however if I push too much data to it, so I tend to use the local internal disks much more as a result to keep the performance at a reasonable level in the server.

Note, it is also possible to implement the shared iSCSI OpenFiler drive as a VM on the same ESX server which I plan to play with next. I haven’t tried the iSCSI box however in a vmotion context yet so can’t comment on how reliable (or capable) it is.

I do have 2 ESXi machines (second is an experimental server) on the same hub but haven’t played with the clustering capability. Just got added to my list to try out when I get chance.

Very interested to see how you get on with your vmotion experiment….