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HP Microserver Gen8 ESXi 6 best practice


sandisxxx

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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.

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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 :smile:

 

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 :wink:

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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 :smile:

 

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 :wink:

 

Thanks haydibe, I have to check If the built in SATA controller can handle that.

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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!

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.

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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

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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...

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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 ...

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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?

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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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