sandisxxx Posted July 1, 2016 #1 Posted July 1, 2016 Hello dear community, I have bought the Microserver Gen8 with Celeron G1610T CPU and 8GiB of RAM. The ESXi 6 is booting from USB flash drive. I have 3 Hard drives installed in the Server 120GB SSD one LUN that hosts XPenology VM + Router VM. Then I have 1TB and 2 TB hard drives to use as storage for the XPenology. The CPU does not support VT-d so I'd like to know what is the best practice to have XPenology VM use all of the space available on the two disks? I plan to create a separate LUN on each of the disks and then create a virtual disk on each of them Thick Provisioned taking all available space on the physical disks. Then I'd like to have two virtual disks within XPenology, one 1TB and the other 2TB. No need to set RAID. Is this plan OK or is there a better way how to achieve this? Thanks in advance.
haydibe Posted July 1, 2016 #2 Posted July 1, 2016 You should consider adding raw devides instead of vmdks to your xpe vm.. If you should ever consider to change to a cpu that supports vt-d and add a storage controller to your XPE VM - you just need to plug the sata/sas cables into the controller and XPE will contiue to work seamlessly with the harddisks. No new setup is necessary or creation of a new array will be necessary - i did it myself in the past and it worked like a charm See vmware knoweldge base article: Raw Device Mapping for local storage (1017530) https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micro ... Id=1017530 Though, there are more detailed step by step instruction out there
sandisxxx Posted July 1, 2016 Author #3 Posted July 1, 2016 You should consider adding raw devides instead of vmdks to your xpe vm..If you should ever consider to change to a cpu that supports vt-d and add a storage controller to your XPE VM - you just need to plug the sata/sas cables into the controller and XPE will contiue to work seamlessly with the harddisks. No new setup is necessary or creation of a new array will be necessary - i did it myself in the past and it worked like a charm See vmware knoweldge base article: Raw Device Mapping for local storage (1017530) https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micro ... Id=1017530 Though, there are more detailed step by step instruction out there Thanks haydibe, I have to check If the built in SATA controller can handle that.
haydibe Posted July 1, 2016 #4 Posted July 1, 2016 In case you ever want to udpate the cpu, those are the ones that you should look for: http://ark.intel.com/compare/71074,6570 ... 5730,65727 The G1610T CPU is just added for comparision purposes. The last two require a cpu heatsink mod!
sandisxxx Posted July 1, 2016 Author #5 Posted July 1, 2016 In case you ever want to udpate the cpu, those are the ones that you should look for: http://ark.intel.com/compare/71074,6570 ... 5730,65727The G1610T CPU is just added for comparision purposes. The last two require a cpu heatsink mod! Thanks, I know that article, and also I know, that the Xeon E3s are expensive. For my purpose, I think the G1610T will be just fine. However the power TDP is quite high for that CPU. I do not plan to add any RAID controller now and same for upgrading the CPU. Just IPFire or Mikrotik or some linux router will be running there and XPEnology.
beta17 Posted July 1, 2016 #6 Posted July 1, 2016 Use Proxmox instead. Harddisk can be attached directly to the VM The check which disks are installed ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/ To attach the disk directly to the vm: qm set 592 -virtio2 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3000DM001-1CH166_Z1F41BLC 592 - is just the VM ID virtio2 - is just the Controller, you need to use sata in xpenology
sandisxxx Posted July 1, 2016 Author #7 Posted July 1, 2016 Use Proxmox instead. Harddisk can be attached directly to the VM The check which disks are installed ls -l /dev/disk/by-id/ To attach the disk directly to the vm: qm set 592 -virtio2 /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST3000DM001-1CH166_Z1F41BLC 592 - is just the VM ID virtio2 - is just the Controller, you need to use sata in xpenology Thanx for suggestion, I do not plan to change the hypervisor OS, but if I face something that just does not work for me at ESXi I might consider Proxmox...
haydibe Posted July 1, 2016 #8 Posted July 1, 2016 In ESXI, XPE won't be able to read the SMART status, if you don't assign a pysical storage controller (which requires vt-d) to your vm. Though, not sure if the result would be the same with proxmox. Plus: oktisme created a dsm6 version that we manged to get up and running in ESXi ...
sandisxxx Posted July 1, 2016 Author #9 Posted July 1, 2016 In ESXI, XPE won't be able to read the SMART status, if you don't assign a pysical storage controller (which requires vt-d) to your vm.Though, not sure if the result would be the same with proxmox. Plus: oktisme created a dsm6 version that we manged to get up and running in ESXi ... Can you please provide me some link of that?
sandisxxx Posted July 1, 2016 Author #10 Posted July 1, 2016 In ESXI, XPE won't be able to read the SMART status, if you don't assign a pysical storage controller (which requires vt-d) to your vm.Though, not sure if the result would be the same with proxmox. Plus: oktisme created a dsm6 version that we manged to get up and running in ESXi ... Can you please provide me some link of that? Nevermind, I have found it in the forums...
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