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Hi

I have the Intel® Xeon® CPU E3-1220L V2 @ 2.30GHz with 8 Gb ram for about 10 days; running latest xpenology (boot from usb -xpenoboot).

I think the hardware is a bit overkill to do just that, and I want to go the esxi way. Also the virtual box in xpeno is a joke, gives very poor performance (monster mouse lag).

- Is there a way not to lose the data on the hard drives when moving to esxi ? I have 2 hd-drives, no raid involved.

- If running 3 machines (xpenologi, windows and some linux distro) can I use the same storage for all ? I mean give 20 Gb to each machine but all of them to share the rest of hdd space for storage.

- What version to use ? I see 5.5 and 6.0, both with custom images on the hp website

- I also do not want to go the "trial" way, is free licence enough to manage a few machines with no major hassle ? I'm not clear about the limitations of the free version.

PS: my gen8 is not silent at all, fan at 15% most of the time but it has an annoying coil noise; this is my second unit, returned the first one for this reason, no luck...

 

Edit: As I keep reading tutorials, I see that most recommend using another drive (ssd if possible) for storing virtual machines; I only have 2 drives, is it possible to use only a partition from one of them for machines and leave the rest for storage ?

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Hi

I have the Intel® Xeon® CPU E3-1220L V2 @ 2.30GHz with 8 Gb ram for about 10 days; running latest xpenology (boot from usb -xpenoboot).

I think the hardware is a bit overkill to do just that, and I want to go the esxi way. Also the virtual box in xpeno is a joke, gives very poor performance (monster mouse lag).

- Is there a way not to lose the data on the hard drives when moving to esxi ? I have 2 hd-drives, no raid involved.

- If running 3 machines (xpenologi, windows and some linux distro) can I use the same storage for all ? I mean give 20 Gb to each machine but all of them to share the rest of hdd space for storage.

- What version to use ? I see 5.5 and 6.0, both with custom images on the hp website

- I also do not want to go the "trial" way, is free licence enough to manage a few machines with no major hassle ? I'm not clear about the limitations of the free version.

PS: my gen8 is not silent at all, fan at 15% most of the time but it has an annoying coil noise; this is my second unit, returned the first one for this reason, no luck...

 

Edit: As I keep reading tutorials, I see that most recommend using another drive (ssd if possible) for storing virtual machines; I only have 2 drives, is it possible to use only a partition from one of them for machines and leave the rest for storage ?

 

 

You can either go virtual disk way, or RAW device mapping way. Virtual disk is the slowest and you'll basically need to reformat your harddrives. If you use RDM, you in theory, just connect your harddrive to Xpenology virtual machine and you are pretty much done. '

 

Esxi requires a complete reformat of all disks at the time of installation.You can, of course, unplug other harddrives to keep the data, but the main one will require a complete reformat. You can use the remaining space on ESXI boot disk for the datastore where you can save virtual machines and virtual harddrives.

 

The free ESXI should be more than enough for your needs. Paid version includes features like SSD as cache for HDD, consolidated management of multiple ESXI servers, etc.

 

If your hardware is fully supported on 6.0 then install that. If its only supported on 5.5 then install that instead. Vmware often removes support for older hardware in their newer versions.

 

You can create dynamically expanding virtual disks, but once the space is used its not released back even if you clean disk inside virtual machine. I think there was a feature that allows sharing virtual disk by multiple virtual machines. If it works the way I think it works, you should be able to use, say, NTFS formatted disk by multiple systems at the same time.

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Thanks for explaining; at the moment I only have my 2 data drives, ext3 or ext4 (whatever is default from xpenology). The biggest usb stick I have is only 8 Gb, while this might be enough for esxi + xpenology vm it will not have space for other machines :sad:

I do have another 1 Tb hdd but it is not reliable, it gets very hot (can't touch it while working) and is to slow; used to be an external usb backup drive that failed me. I guess I'll hold on to the current setup until I can get another drive for esxi+vm's.

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I just cannibalized another external usb-hdd, extracting a 1 Tb drive; I am about to start, just not sure how it's better:

- Install esxi on the 1 Tb drive and use the remainig space on it for vm's

or

- Install esxi on an usb stick and use one hdd for vm's and the other 2 for data

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I got an error trying to install on the 1Tb drive, now instaling custom hp esxi 6.0 on 4 Gb usb stick. I'll see if I can finish up with a xpeno vm on that drive.

Edit:

unable to create a datastore on that drive; might be broken, or do I have to set up some things in bios ? I remember choosing ahci before installing xpenology via xpenoboot.

Edit 2 :

This time worked, on the same drive that gave error before. I have xpeno 5.2 running. Now I have to figure out how to create a datastore from the other two hdd without losing the data.

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I gave up;

"cannot change the host configuration" every time I try to add the other drives; also the vSphere client on my pc does not always connect, just hangs...

I'm back on my xpenoboot config

So to recap :

-installed on a 4Gb usb stick the custom hp esxi 6.0 image from here https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/detail ... ductId=491

-managed to create a datastore and use it to create a xpenology vm on it

-unable to connect with vSphere sometimes

-unable to create more data stores

 

Not sure where I'm mistaking but for now I give up.

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I got an error trying to install on the 1Tb drive, now instaling custom hp esxi 6.0 on 4 Gb usb stick. I'll see if I can finish up with a xpeno vm on that drive.

Edit:

unable to create a datastore on that drive; might be broken, or do I have to set up some things in bios ? I remember choosing ahci before installing xpenology via xpenoboot.

Edit 2 :

This time worked, on the same drive that gave error before. I have xpeno 5.2 running. Now I have to figure out how to create a datastore from the other two hdd without losing the data.

 

You don't create a datastore(on your HDDs with data) if you want to use your hdd without losing data. You need to create a virtual disk file that would link directly to the harddrive and then you add that virtual disk to the virtual machine.

 

 

 

As for the error you probably have bad sectors on your harddrive.

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Thank you, I'll try that.

However, I doubt that all 3 of my drives are corrupted; using two of them with no issues right now.

I think using a custom hp 6.0 image was not the best choice. I'll play around with it some more, maybe I figure out where I was wrong...

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Thank you, I'll try that.

However, I doubt that all 3 of my drives are corrupted; using two of them with no issues right now.

I think using a custom hp 6.0 image was not the best choice. I'll play around with it some more, maybe I figure out where I was wrong...

 

No, I am saying your 1TB drive probably has bad sectors.If HP released a custom image that means they are supplying additional drivers that are missing in the original installation.

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"Failed to start the virtual machine.

Module Disk power on failed.

Cannot open the disk '/vmfs/volumes/53911b54-c75db90a-af5b-d0bf9c464d28/RDM/st1tb.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.

Failed to lock the file"

I did the same thing for both drives, added both the exact same way, if I remove st1tb and keep only the other one the xpeno starts.

"independent-persistent" checked for both

 

Edit :

I got the vm started with both drives after an esxi reboot; however, the xpenology requested me to perform a repair on the drives, I hesitated and searched the web for a few minutes (do not want to mess anything on them for now) and suddenly the drives disappear , with message to check network connection... strange

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"Failed to start the virtual machine.

Module Disk power on failed.

Cannot open the disk '/vmfs/volumes/53911b54-c75db90a-af5b-d0bf9c464d28/RDM/st1tb.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.

Failed to lock the file"

I did the same thing for both drives, added both the exact same way, if I remove st1tb and keep only the other one the xpeno starts.

"independent-persistent" checked for both

 

Edit :

I got the vm started with both drives after an esxi reboot; however, the xpenology requested me to perform a repair on the drives, I hesitated and searched the web for a few minutes (do not want to mess anything on them for now) and suddenly the drives disappear , with message to check network connection... strange

 

It shouldn't show you the "independent-persistent" for a non-virtual disks.

 

Here is how it looks on my screen.

 

1 Virtual Boot disk, 3 physical disks and 1 virtual system disk.

 

http://s7.postimg.org/dxfzxcmtn/esxi_RDM.png

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It look's like mine.

I'll make another try tomorrow, it appears that I have to create some array in the HP bios first.

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

If you create a raid array, it will erase all data on disks that you want to put into array.

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Any VM created must have a usb controller installled in order to add any usb drive.

Quick way, install the xhci, and just plug a ntfs usb thumd drive in.

go back to edit and add the usb drive.

You will see it right away on the top line of Dsm.

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All is working OK for now. Xpenology appears to be slower than bare metal install, but it was doing a lot at the time and my setup is not the best, I'm sure of that.

I can't get the web client to manage some stuff, searched and downloaded images from VMware but no luck. Where to get the web client ?

How can I connect with to esxi from everywhere? I want to be able to manage VM's, create edit and delete them from everywhere.

As for connecting to each VM I guess I have to rdp or vnc on them.

Is it OK to attach the same vmdk drives that I use on xpeno to other VM's ? (Windows, Ubuntu)

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

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All is working OK for now. Xpenology appears to be slower than bare metal install, but it was doing a lot at the time and my setup is not the best, I'm sure of that.

I can't get the web client to manage some stuff, searched and downloaded images from VMware but no luck. Where to get the web client ?

How can I connect with to esxi from everywhere? I want to be able to manage VM's, create edit and delete them from everywhere.

As for connecting to each VM I guess I have to rdp or vnc on them.

Is it OK to attach the same vmdk drives that I use on xpeno to other VM's ? (Windows, Ubuntu)

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Web client only comes with a paid version. You need a dedicated machine for it with ~4GB of ram and you need to install bunch of services. Its designed to manage many ESXI servers from a single web GUI.

 

What you can do is run some older windows as one of your virtual machines and have a vSphere client there. Windows XP should be perfect for this as it doesn't require too much ram and disk space. RDP client is available on many systems. Iirc, Chrome browser has an RDP addon.

 

Yea, you can attach vmdk drivers to different virtual machines, but you need to remove them first from the xpenology or it will complain.

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Thanks again, for the explanation and advice. I understand now why I couldn't find the web client.

I just started to do that but with a win7.

What is enough for a xp install ?

2 CPU, 1 GB ram and 20 GB drive will be OK?

For now I leave the vmdk only in xpenology, as I am able to access them using network share.

So many new stuff to play with, my brain is boiling :smile:

And my back is killing me lol

 

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

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Thanks again, for the explanation and advice. I understand now why I couldn't find the web client.

I just started to do that but with a win7.

What is enough for a xp install ?

2 CPU, 1 GB ram and 20 GB drive will be OK?

For now I leave the vmdk only in xpenology, as I am able to access them using network share.

So many new stuff to play with, my brain is boiling :smile:

And my back is killing me lol

 

 

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

This is from MS website

 

Pentium 233-megahertz (MHz) processor or faster (300 MHz is recommended)

At least 64 megabytes (MB) of RAM (128 MB is recommended)

At least 1.5 gigabytes (GB) of available space on the hard disk

 

So, about 256 RAM, 2-3GB disk, 1 cpu should be enough if you only plan to use vSphere client.

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I installed win XP, but could not connect using the vSphere client; here is a link with the fix, even for the 32 bit version of xp (vi editor involved)

http://www.bloggerbaru.com/how-to-fix-c ... re-5-15-5/

Now it is working, but omg how slow is xp...

 

Try installing vmware tools. However, I suspect its the issue with your harddrive where you have datastore. All my virtual machines are stored on SSD harddrives and even Windows 2012 R2 runs smoothly with only 600MB ram allocated for it.

 

You can try creating ISCSI LUN on your xpenology and have vmware connect to it. Store virtual machine there and see how it performs. I am not sure if Synology allows allocating space for LUN image, so you don't lose performance when it expands.

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