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HP Microserver Gen8 + Esxi + XPEnology


remylpat

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Hi All,

 

I am looking for some advices.

 

This is what I would like to do :

GEN8 with Esxi and Xpenology + Some VMs running

 

Q1 : What is Better for running Esxi ? SDCard ? USB internal ? HDD ?

Q2 : Where to install XPenology ? USB ? VMDK ?

Q3 : Currently I have 3 HDD : 3To + 2 x 2To. I would like to use RAID to backup data and I am wondering what is the best and how to configure it ?

a: Having RAID in HP Hardware level managed. But How to do it ?

b: having RAID managed by XPenology by itsel directly accessing the physical HDD

 

Q4 : How to create a good environnement in order to faciliate upgrade of XPenoogy. If XPenolofy run on a VMDK for Volume1 and All Data on another Volume, how to recreate another XPenology instance and Import VOlume 2 on this new instance ?

 

I know it is a lot of questions but any advices will be really apreciated

 

Rgds

 

./Rémy

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Hi All,

 

I am looking for some advices.

 

This is what I would like to do :

GEN8 with Esxi and Xpenology + Some VMs running

 

Q1 : What is Better for running Esxi ? SDCard ? USB internal ? HDD ?

Q2 : Where to install XPenology ? USB ? VMDK ?

Q3 : Currently I have 3 HDD : 3To + 2 x 2To. I would like to use RAID to backup data and I am wondering what is the best and how to configure it ?

a: Having RAID in HP Hardware level managed. But How to do it ?

b: having RAID managed by XPenology by itsel directly accessing the physical HDD

 

Q4 : How to create a good environnement in order to faciliate upgrade of XPenoogy. If XPenolofy run on a VMDK for Volume1 and All Data on another Volume, how to recreate another XPenology instance and Import VOlume 2 on this new instance ?

 

I know it is a lot of questions but any advices will be really apreciated

 

Rgds

 

./Rémy

 

A1: Internal USB or SD

A2: Install the XPEnology VM in the ESX datastore. The ds would be used also for other VMs. My suggestion is to use the disks in RDM (Raw Device Mapping). In this way, you could migrate the drives to another system (other host, other hypervisor type or physical system). Unfortunately, you will lack SMART in the DSM, but the drives will be monitored by ESX (hope i'm not wrong)

A3: Because you have an uneven number of TB available on 3 HDDs, you can play a bit with different volume configurations but the best and easy option and my personal choice thinking also in the future where you'd buy more HDDs, is to use SHR1 raid type. Go at https://www.synology.com/en-us/support/RAID_calculator and play with the configurator and have in mind that if any of the disks would fail, you will be protected. Not sure about that 1TB of unused space if you could use it in a separate volume for data that's not important.

 

Good luck!

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Hi

Just set up mine, using this: viewtopic.php?f=2&t=2147

except that I boot from SD.

I inserted a blank micro-SD (2Gb) and also a 2.5" HDD from a notebook. You can put a SSD, but you don't really need speed there. You can mount it in the optical drive bay, or if you already have an optical drive, double-side-tape it above the RAM modules.

Very easy: use ILO console. Mount ESXI ISO from there. I used 5.1 as I read there are some limits to VM management in 5.5, and I didn't feel that the new features from 5.5 would be useful to me (mostly large capacities). If anybody sees something interesting, please explain.

Then, during install, press yes,yes,ok,keep going,yes,ooh yes, and when prompted where to install vwmare, choose ilo-sdcard or something like that.

After install, reboot. Start the vsphere client. You have to create the datastore on your HDD, and then tell ESXI to use it to store temp files (logs, etc.).

And you're done !

 

Edit: I tried both with Raid controller enabled and disabled, and then raw-device-mappings.

With raid controller disabled, I can actually see disks type, serial and especially SMART status, whereas in B120i controller mode I couldn't (shows instead generic information sent from the controller).

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Hi Rémy

 

In the link provided, at step 3, you have a link that ends up in vmware's website. You have to register, and also to apply for a free esxi license.

I still haven't tried USB on my VM, but I know that you first have to add an USB controller to a VM before adding the device.

I found somewhere (can't remember where, though) a package that adds open-vm-tools to your virtual xpenology. Worth adding.

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