The nice folks at VMWare recently made ESXi ‘free’. I put that in quotes because the licence gets you the server and Virtual Infrastructure (VI) client, but you still need to pony up for the extra management stuff, and fun toys like VMotion.
ESXi is very stripped down too, and missing a lot of commands useful for rolling your own backups. Still, it’s a very valuable thing to have.
At work, we have a few little PCs I built which we have been using as a test network in a box. Previously, we had seven or eight random old PCs and servers of various vintages running test versions of software. They took up far too much space, so we built some little boxes to run Linux (SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 and VMWare Server 2. The specs are quite reasonable:
- ASRock AM2NF3-VSTA motherboard
- AMD Athlon 64 4000+
- 4GB Crucial RAM
- Liteon DVDRW IDE drive
- GeForce 4MX AGP graphics card
- Intel Pro1000MT NIC
- 3Com 3c905TX-CMX 100Mbs NIC
- 20GB Hard disk for booting
- 160GB Seagate 7200.10 SATA hard disk for Virtual Machine (VM) images
They didn’t cost much to put together (around £250), and performed reasonably well. The big sticking point was the fact the VMs were all on one disk, which meant lots of disk thrashing. I re-configured one box to use two 80Gb Seagate 7200.9 SATA drives we had I’d pulled out of a server. Balancing the virtual machines between these sped things up a bit.
When ESXi was made free, it was inevitable I’d end up installing it. It booted fine, and found the disks. I’d already backed up the VMs from one disk, so I installed. After a reboot, it was working fine. I tried mounting the other disk still in the system, but ESXi couldn’t see it. It seems it can’t read ReiserFS volumes. I tried some of the windows Reiser utilities to mount the disk, but copying files over the network was horrendously slow. I also tried doing the same from a Linux box, but experienced the same.
After much troubleshooting, and chopping and changing of drives, I found the best I could get the disks to muster was around 8Mbs onto the 160Gb drive, and 2Mbs onto the 80Gb. An appalling speed!
I thought back to my previous woes with Seagate drives and nForce controllers, and wondered if different drives would help. We ordered some Western Digital WD2500AAKS 250GB SATA drives, and swapped them over. I rebuilt ESXi, and tried copying some VMs on again. 18Mbs! OK, so it’s still not massively speedy, but it’s a vast improvement.
We have two of these boxes, and in rebuilding the second, I was having trouble getting the first SATA controller to see the drives properly. After some fiddling, I found that Western Digital drives are now pre-set to run at 3GBs speeds (AKA SATA II). I added a jumper to both drives as per the Western Digital instructions, and both drives started to behave. The first ESXi box had done the same, but I put it down to a dead drive. Further testing of the disk showed it to be fine, and when I swapped it with another, it also worked. To play it safe, I added jumpers to the disk in the first ESXi machine. It too seems to have sped up since.
On Friday I had two Active Directory DCs running, a couple of member servers, and another server in the middle of installing Windows Server 2003. I booted another VM running XP Pro, and it booted in a matter of seconds! Pretty impressive stuff for such a cheap machine!
So, the lessons learned:
- Seagate SATA drives seem to have some obscure incompatibility with nForce controllers
- There is a point to jumpers on SATA drives – if your drive won’t detect, or is doing odd things, check which SATA mode it’s in. Additionally, Seagate drives are pre-set to 1.5GBs, so I’m going to take the jumpers off the drives on my main PC – which has an Intel chipset – and see if they speed up any (unlikely).
- ESXi works perfectly well on the hardware above, and is pretty speedy. Assuming you don’t use Seagate drives!
Do you mean that you fixed the slow network copying changing to seagate drives?
No, the opposite happened. It was slow with the Seagate drives. When I changed them for Western Digitals, they were fine.
Thanks David, I have a poweredge 2950 that starts up and restarts very fast but when it comes to networking, say copying a file, it is really slow. It is esxi 3.5 only. I am planning to update it to 3.5 update 2 to see if it a network card driver problem. The network card is a Broadcom that comes with the intel motherboard.
I always recommend people having trouble with ESXi (or any VMware product) drop by the VMware Communities http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vi/esxi3.5
Usually the folks there have either seen the issue or can help you track it down.
Funnily enough, I did go to the forum, but nobody seemed to really know what the issue was. I did report back my findings though, which I hope helped somebody.
Forums are usually my first port of call for such odd issues with anything.