WhiteBox - 4

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

Two side notes. You can use a normal network card. It doesn’t have to be an Intel® PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Server Adapter, as long as it’s an Intel PRO, the onboard Marvel adapter isn’t supported. Besides that, I’ve bought the wrong DVD-ROM. There’s little support for IDE or PATA DVD-ROM devices so you better choose a SATA DVD-ROM, otherwise the setup will crash,  asking you for the install media. My list is no guarantee, maybe the final ESX release isn’t working on this configuration. Have fun with it.

              

   

In my former test environment I was running a few HP D530 desktop’s. Those machines were perfectly compatible with ESX 3.5U2. I’m now participating in the ESX.Next beta and the D530 desktops can’t run ESX.Next because the D530’s CPU is 32 bits. I had to find an alternate machine. This new machine must contain a compatible motherboard with a supported SATA controller and NIC. I’ve tried the HP7700 but the SATA controller and NIC aren’t detected. Finally I tried a three year old desktop (Fujitsu Siemens Scaleo P) that was getting a cold in my garage. My Fujitsu Siemens (ASUS) A8NE-FM with a dual core AMD Athlon processor functions perfectly (out of the box). This machine contains a CK804 Serial ATA Controller connected to a SAMSUNG_HD501LJ Local ATA Disk. The only downside is the nVidia NForce Netrwork Controller with a maximum speed of 100 Mb. Btw ESX.Next is running in WS 6.5 but you can’t start a virtual machine. WS 6.5.1 is ESX.Next compatible.

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 :-).