A VMware High-Availability Cluster at Home

The past few days I’ve been very busy with building my second future proof ESX server. I still had an unused (repaired) Asus V2-P5G33 Bare-Bone, and decided to buy some CPU and memory to get this host up and running. Here’s my shopping list.

Bare bone Asus V2-P5G33
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) Quad CPU Q9400 @ 2.66 GHz
Memory OCZ 8 GB DDR2-800 Kit
Storage Samsung HD501LJ 500GB Internal SATA 16MB 7200RPM Hard Drive
Network Intel® PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Server Adapter
DVD-ROM Samsung SH-D163
Diet Coke

The first thing I did was a vMotion migration of a virtual machine with it's disk on an Openfiler Virtual iSCSI Appliance. The second thing I tried was, enabling Fault Tollerence, but that didn’t work because my CPU’s aren’t supported. The third thing I did was enabeling VMware HA.
When you enable a cluster for VMware HA, you specify the number of host failures to be able to recover from. If you specify the number of host failures allowed as 1, VMware HA maintains enough capacity across the cluster to tolerate the failure of one host, so that all running virtual machines on that host can be restarted on remaining hosts. By default, you cannot power on a virtual machine if doing so violates required failover capacity. In the HA Advanced Runtime Info, you can check how many “Available slots” are left, and what resources on “Slot size” takes.

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Hey Eric why did you buy the Q9400 instead of a Xeon say X3350 so you could test FT? Im looking at building a home lab too but I am going to wait till Tuesday just in case there is any big changes that will change the hardware I am looking at using..

#1 Packetboy on 2009-04-17 14:38 (Reply)

It had to be vMotion compatible with the Q8200 and fit in a 775 socket. I didn’t care for the FT feature, two running hosts is all I need for course prepping.

#1.1 Eric Sloof on 2009-04-17 14:48 (Reply)

Eric, Did you test your setup with ESX inside VMware Workstation?

#2 Rob Mokkink on 2009-04-17 17:06 (Reply)

Yes I did http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/769-VMware-Workstation-6.5.1-and-ESX.Next.html

#2.1 Eric Sloof on 2009-04-17 18:17 (Reply)

Nice setup Eric. Is that a workable environment (noise-level) with those 3 boxes on your desk ? Or were they placed on your desk only for the picture ?

#3 LucD on 2009-04-17 18:34 (Reply)

Yes is workable, they are placed on my desk permanently and don’t make a lot of noise. The only thing you will hear is a spinning hard disk.

#3.1 Eric Sloof on 2009-04-17 18:38 (Reply)

Cool setup, nice & quiet... I've updated mine recently too (although it looks a lot messier

), will post up the vSphere side when it's public http://vinf.net/2009/04/02/new-home-lab-design/

#4 Vinf (Homepage) on 2009-04-17 19:07 (Reply)

Hi Eric where abouts in VC is 'HA Advanced Runtime info' ?

#5 Vince Roberts (Homepage) on 2009-04-17 20:04 (Reply)

So what was the ballpark price for the lab including the iscsi if you don't mind?

#6 matt L on 2009-04-17 23:39 (Reply)

Hi Eric, i assume you created a cluster of your both Asus barebones running vSphere on bare metal. Did you ever try to set up ESX 3.5/ESXi bare metal on one of the Asus boxes and then run multiple virtualized vSphere ESX servers on it? Thanks Sven

#7 Sven on 2009-04-22 10:34 (Reply)

On the subject of load balancing, why not get the highest availability while not getting caught in high prices? Kemp’s got some great load balancers that are low priced and high in quality: http://www.kemptechnologies.com/?utm_source=blog&utm_medium=pv&utm_content=zs&utm_campaign=home

#8 todd on 2009-04-23 22:32 (Reply)

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NTPRO.NL - Eric Sloof

Friday, 17 April 2009

A VMware High-Availability Cluster at Home

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