WhiteBox

A few days ago I’ve hooked-up my newly bought Intel SSD drive to one of my ESX server but didn’t realize it was the one with an ICH9 SATA controller. After some first tests I was a bit disappointed with the outcome, only 150 MB/Sec. After exchanging some email with Simon Seagrave over at techhead.co.uk who also has bought an SSD drive, I realized I was using the wrong ESX server. The SSD drive is now hooked-up to a server with an ICH10 SATA controller. I quickly fired-up the servers to see how fast the SSD drive is running now and it really matters. The difference is significant.

Next week my new Cisco Catalyst 2960G-8TC-L switch will arrive so I went to the store to buy some additional Intel PRO/1000 adapters to get fully prepped. While I was waiting in queue at Informatique an article written by Chad Sakac popped into my mind, in his article he predicted that 2010 will be the year of Solid State Storage. I noticed a real nice offer from Intel; the X25-M Postville SSD 80GB for only 200€ and tough what te heck, let’s buy one.

Model Name Intel X25-M Mainstream SATA Solid-State Drive
Capacity 80GB
NAND Flash Components Intel® Multi-Level Cell (MLC) NAND Flash Memory
Bandwidth  Up to 250MB/s Read Speeds - Up to 70MB/s Write Speeds
Read Latency 85 microseconds
Interface SATA 1.5 Gb/s and 3.0 Gb/s

All the NICS and the SSD drive are build into my two white boxes so I fired up HD Tune Pro in a virtual machine with a 8 GB test disk hosted on the newly created SSD-VMFS. The HD Tune Pro has a real nice feature which enables you to export screenshots of the measurements.

So, here is a quick benchmark comparison between SATA (10 GB) and SSD (8 GB) storage.

The past few days the experts from inPeople and inVirtualize have been working on their Nehalem Whitebox. This great setup with an Intel Core i7 975 Extreme 1366 processor has the pleasure to ultra-fast take use of the enclosed 16Gbyte of memory. Of course they've added some other speedy goodies like Solid State Disk and some extra NIC ports. Here are the specs for those who want to start playing as well.

Shuttle SX58H7

• Processor Intel® Core i7 975 Extreme 1366
• Memory DDR3 1333MHz 4x4GB
• Storage 2x Transcend 32GB TS32GSSD25S-M SATA
• SSD Bracket Scythe Twin Mounter (2x 2,5" in one 3,5")
• Network Intel® PRO/1000 PT Quad Port Server
• Graphic Point VGA 8400GS 512MB PCIe
• External DVD

They will start adding some shared storage (QNAPs with a lot more SSD) to build several solutions on top of it. More details will follow...

When teaching classes I always show my students how to build up their own vSphere home lab just to run through the labs again or because it’s so cool to do a VMotion at home. One of my students has sent me an email with a link to a really nice device that can save you lots of money on your energy bill. Jean-Marc Zohlandt has bought the IP Boot Manager 9280 and is powering on his machines from a remote location only when they need to be powered on.

IP Boot Manager acts as a manager for your PC & Server . It handles all the ESX servers and storage with just one Internet Browser Screen and a simple connection to Internet. You can remote control & access the power + Reset and schedule daily server actions.

It saves manpower and time during unmanned periods. No more driving to the server room for a reset. IP Boot Manager 9280 is a unique device designed to help you manage up to 8 separate servers with one IP address. With this device you can control Power (On/Off), Reset, Schedule daily server actions and Auto ping (Watch Dog) your ESX servers.

Introducing the StorCenter ix2-200 Network Storage device, offering content sharing with advanced media features and data protection in an easy-to-use product ideal for small/remote offices, workgroups and power home users.

- Built-in EMC world-class storage and security technologies for enhanced data protection
- Easy 4-click setup
- Remote access to your network storage device from anywhere in the world
- Built-in torrent support for peer-to-peer file sharing
- User replaceable drives
- Iomega QuikTransfer moves data from a USB drive or replicates your data without the need of a PC
- Advanced features such as security camera capabilities, user/group setups, and Bluetooth upload
- Device-to-Device Replication using rsync-powered copy jobs.
- VMware certified for NFS and iSCSI
- Three year product warranty (with registration)
- 1TB, 2TB and 4TB capacities available

Building your own VMware ESXi Server in under an hour with parts you may have lying under your bed. Extreme sports cameras and mounts and mounts can be expensive. Why not build your own for about 5 bucks. And light video editing that's both easy and free? Avidemux may be the answer.

Dave Mishchenko has published a lot of tips and tricks about running ESXi and ESX 4.0 on unsupported, but working hardware. The list contains motherboards and unsupported servers that work with ESX 4.0 and / or ESXi 4.0 installable. Add your own known to be working model or take a peek at the list at http://www.vm-help.com.

This table contains a list of systems, motherboards, storage controllers and network cards that have been tested and found to work with ESX 4.0 or ESXi 4.0 Installable. Please check out the source column for a system you are considering using as some systems will include special steps to enable ESX / ESXi to run on that system or have other issues to overcome. None of these systems are supported by VMWare for running ESX.

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.

My prior WhiteBox suddenly didn’t start-up anymore; the guys over at Alternate did some tests and concluded; the motherboard was broken. They didn’t give me a replacement, but will send the barebone to Asus. I should expect it to return in six weeks! Yes, I definitely made some noise over there and finally got discount on the new model, the Asus V3-P5G45. I also swapped the DVD-DMA for a DVD-SATA, and placed all the other parts into the new box. I pressed the power button with crossed fingers, and the Asus V3-P5G45 works like a charm. I only had to answer some relocation questions when I tried to start the VM’s. So here’s my new shopping list:

• Bare bone Asus V3-P5G45
• Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33 GHz
• Memory GeiL 8 GB DDR2-667 Kit
• Storage  Samsung HD501LJ 500GB Internal SATA 16MB 7200RPM Hard Drive
• Network Intel® PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Server Adapter
• DVD-ROM Samsung SA-D163

Finally I had some time left (no training at the moment) and took the opportunity to build a decent WhiteBox. This bare bone system contains an Intel QuadCPU and 8 GB of memory and still stays under $500 USD. I’ve installed the future version of ESX and it works like a charm. The first virtual machine I created is acting as my vCenter Server and I installed it while I was cooking dinner, great performance. The next step is installing Windows 7 (64 bit), but my good old friend Mike Laverick has beat me to it. He’s already showing some really cool VMware View stuff.  I’m still going to try out some of the new features anyway.

Here’s my shopping list:

Bare bone Asus V2-P5G33
Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) Quad CPU Q8200 @ 2.33 GHz
Memory GeiL 8 GB DDR2-667 Kit
Storage  Samsung HD501LJ 500GB Internal SATA 16MB 7200RPM Hard Drive
Network Intel® PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Server Adapter
DVD-ROM Asus DVD-E818A3T

I met Michel Roth (thincomputing.net) at the XTG V-Event last week and we were talking about blogging and his white box. He finally managed to build it and it looks impressive. It’s small aesthetical, pleasing and under $1000.

In my day (and night?) job working for Quest I get to demonstrate the Virtual Access Suite (VAS) a lot. In short this means that I have to demo a VAS infrastructure at the very least consisting of a VAS Connection Broker, a VAS Terminal Server, a VAS Virtual Desktop, a Domain Controller, a VirtualCenter server and a ESX host. With a lot of time and patience one would be able to get pretty far with this with a decent laptop up until ESX. ESX will not run on "normal laptop hardware". Period. So let me share how I found my ultimate ESX Whitebox.

Yesterday Dave over at vm-help.com posted a comment on the ultimate white box article with an URL. I tough let’s give it a try and visited his website. What I saw there was incredible, a complete list with Motherboards and unsupported servers that work with ESX 3.5 and / or 3i Installable.

Since running ESX 3.5 on Workstation 6 seems to be impossible, I had to find another way to explore the new features of ESX 3.5. Searching for a cheap supported configuration isn’t an easy job. You have to find a supported motherboard, network card and SATA controller. I have found a desktop with all these items combined. You can use The HP Compaq d530 - Small form factor (SFF)  DG755A desktop.  My model has a CPU from Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.8 GHz, a NIC from Broadcom Corporatoin NetXtreme BCM5782 Gigabit Ethernet and a SATA 82801EB (ICH5) SATA Controller. I added a 512 Mb memory bank so I have 1 Gigabyte in total. Enough to host a few virtual machines .