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  • What hardware would I need (approx) to run ESXi server?

    - by mr.b
    Hi, I am considering to purchase off-the-shelf commodity hardware in order to build server that will host virtual machines using ESXi server. Intended purpose for this server is NOT mission critical tasks. It will have to run perhaps 20-50 Windows XP/Vista/7 virtual machines (in total, but closer to 20 figure). Each guest would have to have 1-2 GB of ram, and probably two-three times more disk space than guest OS needs with clean install and all updates applied (that would be around 6-8 GB for XP, and i believe closer to 10-15 for win7). Those guests will act as a test ground for a new product that is network management software, thus guests will idle most of their time once initially loaded, but if I give them some task to complete, they should be able to perform reasonably well. Now, from what I have learned... CPU is usually not much of an issue (6 cores would do it), memory should not be lacking, but doesn't have to be sum of all guests, because of overcommitment... That leads me to IO, which is, as it seems, the bottleneck. Since I have very little experience with ESXi (and ESX, too) server, I'd like to ask: How much memory could I save by overcommitment, and how does it affect performance? Is 6-core cpu enough to run above described system? Would it be possible to run entire server off two (or even one) SSD drives (to host system virtual disks, with few additional HDDs (2-3) in RAID 0 to be used as secondary storage? I read somewhere that ESXi allows having something like "master image", essentially virtual machine that is "deployed" many times, so that disk space can be saved by having only differences stored by specific guests, instead of copying around whole virtual disks. Is this true, and how can this help me? Are there any other things I need to take into consideration when building this off-the-shelf solution? I should probably mention here that I'm fully aware of issues like SPOF regarding power supply, raid 0, etc, but since it's only a testing ground and not a production system, it's not so important for me. Thanks, B.

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  • How to backup virtual machines on a standalone ESXi host?

    - by Massimo
    Standalone ESXi (4.1) host without any vCenter Server. How to backup virtual machines as quickly and storage-friendly as possible? I know I can access the ESXi console and use the standard Unix cp command, but this has the downfall of copying the whole VMDK files, not only their actually used space; so, for a 30-GB VMDK of which only 1 GB is used, the backup would take 30 full GBs of space, and time accordingly. And yes, I know about thin-provisioned virtual disks, but they tend to behave very badly when physically copied, and/or to blow up to their full provisioned size; also, they are not recommended for actual VM performance. It is ok for me to shut down the VMs before backing them up (i.e. I don't need "live" backups); but I need a way to copy them around efficiently; and yes, a way to automate shutdown/startup when taking a backup would also help. I only have ESXi; no Service Console, no vCenter Server... what's the best way to handle this task? Also, what about restores?

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  • How do you passthrough native SATA drives to a guest on ESXi?

    - by John
    I have ESXi 4.0 running on an Intel DX58S0 Mothboardboard with an Intel Core i7 930 processor. VT-d is also enabled. I have three drives in the system, drive 0 is used for ESXi. Drive 1 and 2 contain data from an older machine and show up under the "Storage Adapters" section in configuration. I would like to allow a guest machine to access the data on these drives (as nativly as possible). I have enabled passthrough of the motherboard's built in SATA controller (Intel/Marvell 88SE6121 ). This controller shows up in my guest OS, but the guest shows no drives aside from the normal virtual drive. I have tried a Linux guest and Windows7. I have also configured the host machine to try IDE/RAID/ACHI modes for the SATA controller. Any ideas how I can configure one of my guests to get at the raw data on these drives?

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  • What happens with the Guest OS's on ESXi in the event of a power failure?

    - by Jeremy Holovacs
    Many small businesses would prefer to let their server drop on power failure than to pay even $100 for a cheap UPS. It's often difficult to convince them of the value of something like that; it's why they like ESXi. It's free, they can save a lot of cash by putting a bunch of linux servers on one machine, and then I get paid. :) If the ESXi server experiences a power outage, it is set to come back on automatically when power is restored. What happens with the guest OS's? Ideally I would like them to all come online again as well, assuming they were on when power was lost, but I see no option for choosing this. I don't want to yank power to the system just to try it out, of course. I'm sure someone knows what happens by default, and perhaps how to make my system to work as I would wish.

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  • Possible to use DRBD on two ESXi virtualized servers?

    - by chen
    I have two servers (attached disks have been set up as hardware RAID1 for disk device level failure resilience). Here is the setup in my mind: 1) Install ESXi on each of the physical server, M1, M2; 2) Start one VM on each of the ESXi virtualized physical server V1, V2; 3) Install the DRDB drivers within V1 and V2. Essentially, this is a "virtualizing machine running DRBD in the VM's instead of bare metal hardware" idea. My question is whether the above setup can achieve the same "networked RAID1" goal that DRDB can achieve in the bare-metal physical machines (http://www.drbd.org/). Thanks. [EDIT] I found this (http://serverfault.com/questions/49305/drbd-experimentation-and-virtualization) is a similar question, but the answer does not seem to be firmative enough for me to follow.

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  • Why has ESXi 5.0 not used the software RAID configuration on my test server?

    - by kafka
    I've got a test server which was running WS 2008 Enterprise on the bare metal. It was correctly using the software RAID 1 configuration (2x250 GB disks which appeared as one disk), setup on the Dell Poweredge T110 (which meets compatibility requirements) without requiring any extra setup from me. (As an aside I'm fairly sure it's software RAID, as we didn't spec a hardware RAID controller, if that's of any importance in this situation). I am now testing installing ESXi 5.0 on this server to run some VMs. I've successfully installed ESXi, and imported a VM fine, but it's showing 2 x 250 GB disks available as datastores. However they should be appearing as one volume. When I boot the server, there is a RAID configuration screen you can enter, and I'm guessing this is what I'll have to do at some stage, but now need to be very careful because there is one disk which contains data that I want to be mirrored on the other disk. What is the best thing to do in this situation?

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  • How do you passthrough native SATA drives to a guest on ESXi?

    - by John
    I have ESXi 4.0 running on an Intel DX58S0 Mothboardboard with an Intel Core i7 930 processor. VT-d is also enabled. I have three drives in the system, drive 0 is used for ESXi. Drive 1 and 2 contain data from an older machine and show up under the "Storage Adapters" section in configuration. I would like to allow a guest machine to access the data on these drives (as nativly as possible). I have enabled passthrough of the motherboard's built in SATA controller (Intel/Marvell 88SE6121 ). This controller shows up in my guest OS, but the guest shows no drives aside from the normal virtual drive. I have tried a Linux guest and Windows7. I have also configured the host machine to try IDE/RAID/ACHI modes for the SATA controller. Any ideas how I can configure one of my guests to get at the raw data on these drives?

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  • Is it necessary to change the default users and groups in VMware esxi 4.0 in order to have a secure

    - by Teevus
    By default esxi creates a number of users and groups including: daemon nfsnobody root nobody vimuser dcui How secure is this default security setup? Besides changing the root password, is it advisable to modify the default users and groups? E.g. does esxi use default passwords for the accounts or anything else that could be exploited by malicious users? My scenario is very basic and I don't require any custom users or groups as only sysadmins will ever need to administer the virtual infrastructure, and they can do so using the root account. Thanks

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  • Why would Linux VM in vSphere ESXi 5.5 show dramatically increased disk i/o latency?

    - by mhucka
    I'm stumped and I hope someone else will recognize the symptoms of this problem. Hardware: new Dell T110 II, dual-core Pentium G860 2.9 GHz, onboard SATA controller, one new 500 GB 7200 RPM cabled hard drive inside the box, other drives inside but not mounted yet. No RAID. Software: fresh CentOS 6.5 virtual machine under VMware ESXi 5.5.0 (build 174 + vSphere Client). 2.5 GB RAM allocated. The disk is how CentOS offered to set it up, namely as a volume inside an LVM Volume Group, except that I skipped having a separate /home and simply have / and /boot. CentOS is patched up, ESXi patched up, latest VMware tools installed in the VM. No users on the system, no services running, no files on the disk but the OS installation. I'm interacting with the VM via the VM virtual console in vSphere Client. Before going further, I wanted to check that I configured things more or less reasonably. I ran the following command as root in a shell on the VM: for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10; do dd if=/dev/zero of=/test.img bs=8k count=256k conv=fdatasync done I.e., just repeat the dd command 10 times, which results in printing the transfer rate each time. The results are disturbing. It starts off well: 262144+0 records in 262144+0 records out 2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 20.451 s, 105 MB/s 262144+0 records in 262144+0 records out 2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 20.4202 s, 105 MB/s ... but after 7-8 of these, it then prints 262144+0 records in 262144+0 records out 2147483648 bytes (2.1 GG) copied, 82.9779 s, 25.9 MB/s 262144+0 records in 262144+0 records out 2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 84.0396 s, 25.6 MB/s 262144+0 records in 262144+0 records out 2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 103.42 s, 20.8 MB/s If I wait a significant amount of time, say 30-45 minutes, and run it again, it again goes back to 105 MB/s, and after several rounds (sometimes a few, sometimes 10+), it drops to ~20-25 MB/s again. Plotting the disk latency in vSphere's interface, it shows periods of high disk latency hitting 1.2-1.5 seconds during the times that dd reports the low throughput. (And yes, things get pretty unresponsive while that's happening.) What could be causing this? I'm comfortable that it is not due to the disk failing, because I also had configured two other disks as an additional volume in the same system. At first I thought I did something wrong with that volume, but after commenting the volume out from /etc/fstab and rebooting, and trying the tests on / as shown above, it became clear that the problem is elsewhere. It is probably an ESXi configuration problem, but I'm not very experienced with ESXi. It's probably something stupid, but after trying to figure this out for many hours over multiple days, I can't find the problem, so I hope someone can point me in the right direction. (P.S.: yes, I know this hardware combo won't win any speed awards as a server, and I have reasons for using this low-end hardware and running a single VM, but I think that's besides the point for this question [unless it's actually a hardware problem].) ADDENDUM #1: Reading other answers such as this one made me try adding oflag=direct to dd. However, it makes no difference in the pattern of results: initially the numbers are higher for many rounds, then they drop to 20-25 MB/s. (The initial absolute numbers are in the 50 MB/s range.) ADDENDUM #2: Adding sync ; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches into the loop does not make a difference at all. ADDENDUM #3: To take out further variables, I now run dd such that the file it creates is larger than the amount of RAM on the system. The new command is dd if=/dev/zero of=/test.img bs=16k count=256k conv=fdatasync oflag=direct. Initial throughput numbers with this version of the command are ~50 MB/s. They drop to 20-25 MB/s when things go south. ADDENDUM #4: Here is the output of iostat -d -m -x 1 running in another terminal window while performance is "good" and then again when it's "bad". (While this is going on, I'm running dd if=/dev/zero of=/test.img bs=16k count=256k conv=fdatasync oflag=direct.) First, when things are "good", it shows this: When things go "bad", iostat -d -m -x 1 shows this:

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  • Will the VMs on the ESXi cluster be running after disconnection from the network?

    - by John
    What will happen if I disconnect the ESXi cluster configured with HA from the switch(I need to change the power source on the main switch) and there is no management port redundancy? I'm going to disable the host monitoring and VM monitoring within HA settings, and connect to the switch after it boots up. Will the virtual machines be running if I disconnect the hosts from the network so they will not see any other ESXi host? I hope everything will work fine and the hosts will join the cluster after they connect to the network again, but I would like to be sure ..

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  • What configuration changes can I make to speed up extremely slow Windows VM's in ESXi 4.0.

    - by Shawn Anderson
    I've recently moved from VMWare Server to ESXi 4.0. Running on Dell T310. My VM's have been restored but they are running dog slow compared to VMWare Server. I loaded ESXi 4.0 using only default values. Where are some areas where I can tweak the performance? Even logging onto the VM's can be extremely sluggish. Trying to install software on any of them is a new experience in pain. Dell PowerEdge T310 Xeon X3460 2.80 GHz 32 GB RAM 1 HD (2 TB) I have 16 VM's on this server, but only six or so will be running during my testing. I keep an eye on the Resource Allocation and Performance tabs for the host and I never see CPU or RAM getting anywhere close to pegged. Events tab does show some notices for video RAM issues and some hints on Windows activation issues, but nothing that would point to the sort of sluggishness that I'm experiencing. 1 Windows Server 2008 R2 (64-bit) - 4 GB RAM 1 Windows 7 (32-bit) - 2 GB RAM 1 Vista (32-bit) - 1 GB RAM 3 XP (32-bit) - 1 GB RAM Over to you! Thanks - Shawn

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  • Deleted vmware ESXi snapshot file - any way to recover?

    - by Mark Allison
    Hi there, I wanted to make some changes to a file server VM today on ESXi 4. The machine is a Debian Lenny guest with two virtual disks - one is 8GB and the other is 500Gb (data). In order to protect the machine from unwanted changes, I made a snapshot of the machine. I went ahead and made my changes and it didn't work out well. So, I powered off the VM and went into snapshot manager and reverted to snapshot. However I reverted to an older snapshot and not the one I just made by mistake. I then (idiotically) deleted the snapshot I just made in snapshot manager. This has resulted in me losing about one year's worth of data. Is there any way to recover this deleted snapshot file? I'm using vmware esxi 4. When I browse the VMWare repository I can see various vmdk files - is it possible the data I need is still there? What should I look for? Thanks, Mark.

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  • Is there a way to clone an existing VM on an ESXi server without having to re-import it?

    - by David Mackintosh
    I have imported a VM into an ESXi server using the VMware "Converter stand alone utility". However, this process is a little tedious. Since I eventually want several copies of this VM (or, to be more accurate, several more-or-less identical instances of this VM) to be running at the same time, is there a way to clone the already imported VM? Or do I have to re-import for each instance I want?

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  • what is acceptable datastore latency on VMware ESXi host?

    - by BeowulfNode42
    Looking at our performance figures on our existing VMware ESXi 4.1 host at the Datastore/Real-time performance data Write Latency Avg 14 ms Max 41 ms Read Latency Avg 4.5 ms Max 12 ms People don't seem to be complaining too much about it being slow with those numbers. But how much higher could they get before people found it to be a problem? We are reviewing our head office systems due to running low on storage space, and are tossing up between buying a 2nd VM host with DAS or buying some sort of NAS for SMB file shares in the near term and maybe running VMs from it in the longer term. Currently we have just under 40 staff at head office with 9 smaller branches spread across the country. Head office is runnning in an MS RDS session based environment with linux ERP and mail systems. In total 22 VMs on a single host with DAS made from a RAID 10 made of 6x 15k SAS disks.

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  • how to make a script for esxi vms rebooting process.

    - by user116374
    I'm Using ESXi 5.0 And I have created a lab for metasploit. one time my system exploited, so i have to restart my vms. so it's too much Headache. i have to execute lots of exploit. so i don't want to do the same restart process again and again. so maybe it is possible through the script. so again im stuck. I don't know how to write a script for this process. PLEASE tell me how to write a script for AUTOMATION restart process in 10 20 minute. And how to execute that script. Please Share your knowledge if you know. this script thing is very very useful for me. And also tell me any other way if you know. Ty. Alen.

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  • SSD on Vmware ESXI 4 (TRIM? Good Idea?)

    - by nextgenneo
    Hi, I just posted about finding bottle necks and have narrowed it down to having way too many VMs on my machine on one 15K SAS drive. I have plenty of cores and plenty of ram. So I am planning on putting 6 VMs on one drive (so 5 drives for 30 VMs). I am thinking of using a 60GB Vertex 2 SSD. Each of my VMs will only need about 6GB of HDD space so this isn't a big deal. My questions are: does ESXI support Trim and do I really need it if I leave 25% of the drive as free space? If I need it should I get a diff drive that handles garbage collection differently? I have a RAID controller w/ write caching. I will still benefit from this? Will this effect my setup differently? Is there anything I need to consider regarding SSD's in virtualized environments. Thanks for any and all help!

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  • Using VMware's ESXi, can I plug in 30 USB Wireless adapters and allow each of 30 VMs one?

    - by 31eee384
    I'm assuming ESXi will act very similarly to VMware Workstation or other products, so answers based on knowledge of those programs might also help. I want to plug in 30 USB Wireless or Ethernet adapters into my server, and let each VM access one and only one of these devices. Unfortunately, I don't have the hardware to just try it out as the purchase of hubs and adapters hinges on the result of this question. The answer could be a resounding "yes, easy!" and that would be great. I couldn't find any answers to this question with google, and it's possible that this is because it's so easy to do. Thanks!

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  • How to setup guest-os raid 1 with vmware esxi?

    - by jM2.me
    In my last questions I didn't make myself clear, so I will do my best to explain it. I have a server with esxi 5 installed on it. I am not able to setup hardware raid atm, and need a workaround. From previous question I have been told to setup a raid for guest-os (don't confuse with hardware/software raid for/on host). I wasn't able to find any information about this, nor found any option in guest-os bios. Help appreciated. Edit: I have two drives setup as datastores. Each drive/datastore will host one image file for guest os

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  • How does a winkydink Teradici offer high res, full FPS, 3D rendering on ESXi 5 VDIs for AutoCAD/SolidWorks/1080p YouTube applications?

    - by BlueToast
    How does such a small Teradici card ![enter image description here][1] offer high resolution, full FPS 3D graphics (1:38) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXA4QMmfY5Y&feature=player_detailpage#t=97s for ESXi 5.0/5.1 VDI environments? We're shooting for an AutoCAD/SolidWorks/YouTube 1080p capable environment. I can't see how such a small and low profile card could possibly have the horsepower to handle such GPU computations for a big environment like that. We're going to have up to 64 VDIs per server, and are a 500-1000 employee count sized company. Someone enlighten me please! Determining which route to go (between RemoteFX and VMware View/PCoIP) and the hardware (NVIDIA 4GB non-Quadro/Tesla GPUs vs Teradici card). Servers have three 4x, three 8x, and one 16x PCI-E lane. Two of the 8x lanes will be occupied by SAS RAID cards.

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  • Using VMware's ESXi, can I plug in 30 USB Wireless adapters and allow each of 30 VMs one?

    - by 31eee384
    I'm assuming ESXi will act very similarly to VMware Workstation or other products, so answers based on knowledge of those programs might also help. I want to plug in 30 USB Wireless or Ethernet adapters into my server, and let each VM access one and only one of these devices. Unfortunately, I don't have the hardware to just try it out as the purchase of hubs and adapters hinges on the result of this question. The answer could be a resounding "yes, easy!" and that would be great. I couldn't find any answers to this question with google, and it's possible that this is because it's so easy to do.

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  • Which is the recommended filesystem for VMware Server / ESXi?

    - by elitalon
    We have a couple of servers in office with VMware Server as virtualization solution. We are planning an upgrade of our infrastructure. Some servers will remain with VMware Server, but we want to migrate some others to VMware ESXi. In both cases we are making a fresh install, and I wonder if there any suggestion/guidelines regarding the host filesystem and its partitions. EDIT: We are using local storage instead of SAN/NAS external storage, because we are not sure if it is worth it to use them given our office size/requirements.

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