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[SOLVED] Install on vmware ESXI


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Hi,

 

Just to confirm another successful install. Also I noticed on the first boot VMWare Esxi5 ignored the Paravirtual SCSI and defaulted back to LSI SCSI. I put it back to the correct setting and restarted and it seems to have stayed there so far.

 

I'm interested to know how people measure LAN/NAS disk reads and writes so we can compare like for like. I used Helios LAN test and got 50MB / sec for sopme of the tests. I also used Blackmagic disk speed test and got over 100MB per second. Now I know they are using different files and different tests so not too concerned about the difference. I would be interested in seeing what other tools people use though.

 

I didn't create any special disks for performance, just stayed with the standard VMWare stuff.

 

The server is an older quad core Intel thing running at 2.5Ghz. its approx two years old.

 

I'll torture tests it over the next few days to see how it stands up.

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has any one successfully use Passthrough?

 

I have a Xeon E3-1260 CPU on H77 motherboard. BIOS with VT-d enabled, and in ESX5.1, passthrough the Panther POint PCI device.

 

I added the device to the Syno_boot machine, and Upon installation, it can not find any hard drive.

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I am running ESXI 5.1 on a Proliant Microserver N54L with 8GB RAM; a cut-down NC360T Dual NIC (to fit x1 slot); an HP P410 raid controller with 512MB cache and BBU; and 4 x Seagate 2TB hard disks in Raid 10 configuration.

 

I am currently running two VMs: pfSense; and DSM 4.2.

 

The DSM vm is running with 1 cpu (2.2GHz) and 2GB ram, and transfer rates using standard virtual disks is 80-100MB/s on average both reading and writing. CPU is around 40-60% during sustained transfer.

 

I've just recently added a D-LINK D140 wireless USB dongle to the vm with no problems either, and am testing DSM as a wireless extender.

 

I toyed with a native installation (I have DSM 4.2 installed on an HP N40L), but have found ESXI to be a far superior solution.

 

BTW to access the boot disk to change the grub.conf mac and serial numbers, add a SCSI disk (pointing to the boot image) whilst DSM is running; ssh to the DSM vm; mount the disk; edit the file; unmounts the disk; remove the disk from the vm; reboot.

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Thought I'd chime in here and add myself to the list of successful installs and say thanks!

 

ESXi 5.1 with 5 VM's (my test server)

i920 w/P6T SE MB

18GB RAM

120GB SSD

1x250GB HD

1x500GB HD

1x1TB HD

3 drives mapped to RDM and SHR in xpenology (1CPUx2Cores, 2GB RAM dedicated)

 

Transferring about 80-100MB/s with 5% cpu usage. I've been testing Plex on it as well. Using Plex to an Android device I see about 75-80% CPU usage. Overall very happy with the setup. Looking at going to 3TB drives soon to take some of the load off my poor DS411j.

 

Anyone play with iscsi throughput on the xpenology/esxi builds?

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I have succesfully installed the system with 1CPU (2Cores) and 1GB RAM on ESXi 5.1.0 (1117900).

 

The server has the following hardware.

 

Supermicro X8SIL-F

16GB ECC RAM

2x Western Digital RED 3TB

1x Samsung HD204UI 2TB

ESXi running from USB-Stick 8GB

APC UPS CS-350 connected to DSM

 

Volume1 configured as RAID5 with 745GB on each HDD.

Volume2 configured as RAID1 with 2TB on WD REDs.

 

The system runs now for about two weeks without any problems, but i'm actually on testing some packages like mediacenter.

In the next time i want to test iscsi access from am windows8-vm.

 

And i would like to say 'thanks' to the developer and hope for an update to the latest version:-)

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I've got a SuperMicro Superserver with a 1230v2, 32gb RAM, LSI SAS 2308 in IT Mode and 8x Hitachi 5K3000's, ATP USB SLC SSD for ESXi.

 

Xpenology does run natively on this box, but this machine is overkill. I want to virtualise everything with ESXi 5.1

I have SSD's on hardware RAID for datastore, but can't really find a nice elegant solution for Xpenology for my storage array, I have managed to make a VDI from the IMG, but not sure how to make a proper VMDK for ESXi.

 

I do hope more work continues for this as 4.2 would be amazing as a VM with VT-d passthrough SAS controller

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I have noticed that a lot of kernel modules will not load in my DS VM.

 

For example, the NFS module will not load:

 

/usr/syno/etc.defaults/rc.d # /sbin/insmod /lib/modules/nfsd.ko

insmod: can't insert '/lib/modules/nfsd.ko': unknown symbol in module, or unknown parameter

 

This is also true of a lot of other modules...

 

Apologies, but I have just noticed that this is a repeat of a previous post,

viewtopic.php?f=2&t=558&p=2504&hilit=nfsd.ko#p2600

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Thought I'd chime in here and add myself to the list of successful installs and say thanks!

 

ESXi 5.1 with 5 VM's (my test server)

i920 w/P6T SE MB

18GB RAM

120GB SSD

1x250GB HD

1x500GB HD

1x1TB HD

3 drives mapped to RDM and SHR in xpenology (1CPUx2Cores, 2GB RAM dedicated)

 

Transferring about 80-100MB/s with 5% cpu usage. I've been testing Plex on it as well. Using Plex to an Android device I see about 75-80% CPU usage. Overall very happy with the setup. Looking at going to 3TB drives soon to take some of the load off my poor DS411j.

 

Anyone play with iscsi throughput on the xpenology/esxi builds?

 

I was using iscsi on my xpenology esxi box before I broke my data volume partitions. It worked fine for me, although I had never used iscsi before, so I had to do some reading to figure it out.

 

My ESXi consists of 2 VM's:

Synology NAS

Windows 8 w/ Windows Media Center (my HTPC).

 

I created an iscsi on the NAS so I can set it as my record drive for TV in the WMC VM. It worked well except for the part I had to manually connect the iSCSI on windows after each reboot (must be a bug, or I don't know what I am doing :razz: ).

 

Here's my custom Lian Li Q16 which is now my ESXI box. https://picasaweb.google.com/1049792069 ... ianLiPCQ16

 

except the box consists of the following now:

Intel DQ77KB
Intel i7 3770T 45W CPU
Crucial 2 x 8GB SODIMM DDR3
MyDigitalSSD 64GB Smart Series SATA III (6G) SandForce mSATA SSD - ESXI Install and Datastore
Samsung F4 HD204UI 2TB x 4 - Synology SHR Array
SilconDust HD Prime Network Cablecard Tuner
Xbox 360 WMC extender to watch TV

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hey Diverge , are you using RDM on your four 2TB drives, or are you using VT-d passthrough? Do you care to monitor the SMART status on the hard drives?

 

I'm using RDM. I could use VT-d though, as I just got a PCIe card that can mount my mSATA (for ESXI and datastore), then pass through the onboard sata controller (at least I think I can, i'm new to this stuff).

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Is this still running 3202 or has 3211 been patched to run on ESXi yet?

 

I converted the 3211 image in the link below to vmdk using starwind v2v image converter. It works perfectly in the ESXI and passthrough and NFS are now working. Using passthrough, I assigned a Nic and my onboard sata controller to my DSM VM and the performance is amazing.

 

3211 x64 microserver .img/pat

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_Edi7OdbFZla2NPa3MtNkFia3c&usp=sharing

 

Starwind v2v image converter

http://starwindfreev2vconverter.en.softonic.com/

 

Make the folowing selection in starwind

Image format: VMware pre-allocated image

Virtual disk type: IDE

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I was using iscsi on my xpenology esxi box before I broke my data volume partitions. It worked fine for me, although I had never used iscsi before, so I had to do some reading to figure it out.

 

My ESXi consists of 2 VM's:

Synology NAS

Windows 8 w/ Windows Media Center (my HTPC).

 

I created an iscsi on the NAS so I can set it as my record drive for TV in the WMC VM. It worked well except for the part I had to manually connect the iSCSI on windows after each reboot (must be a bug, or I don't know what I am doing :razz: ).

 

Here's my custom Lian Li Q16 which is now my ESXI box. https://picasaweb.google.com/1049792069 ... ianLiPCQ16

 

except the box consists of the following now:

Intel DQ77KB
Intel i7 3770T 45W CPU
Crucial 2 x 8GB SODIMM DDR3
MyDigitalSSD 64GB Smart Series SATA III (6G) SandForce mSATA SSD - ESXI Install and Datastore
Samsung F4 HD204UI 2TB x 4 - Synology SHR Array
SilconDust HD Prime Network Cablecard Tuner
Xbox 360 WMC extender to watch TV

 

Hey Diverge i'm also running a dq77kb. The dq77kb is perfect for esxi, i'm running it with a x4 HBA card and 2 additional GigE NIC's on the full/half height mini-pcie slots. Are you using Vga passthrough for your HTPC?

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Is this still running 3202 or has 3211 been patched to run on ESXi yet?

 

I converted the 3211 image in the link below to vmdk using starwind v2v image converter. It works perfectly in the ESXI and passthrough and NFS are now working. Using passthrough, I assigned a Nic and my onboard sata controller to my DSM VM and the performance is amazing.

 

3211 x64 microserver .img/pat

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_Edi7OdbFZla2NPa3MtNkFia3c&usp=sharing

 

Starwind v2v image converter

http://starwindfreev2vconverter.en.softonic.com/

 

Make the folowing selection in starwind

Image format: VMware pre-allocated image

Virtual disk type: IDE

 

 

Hi

 

Can you please detail how you install the vmdk onto the ESXi after you did the conversion. I tried to follow the guide and always get

 

GRUB Loading Error 22

 

Thank you.

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Is this still running 3202 or has 3211 been patched to run on ESXi yet?

 

I converted the 3211 image in the link below to vmdk using starwind v2v image converter. It works perfectly in the ESXI and passthrough and NFS are now working. Using passthrough, I assigned a Nic and my onboard sata controller to my DSM VM and the performance is amazing.

 

3211 x64 microserver .img/pat

https://drive.google.com/folderview?id=0B_Edi7OdbFZla2NPa3MtNkFia3c&usp=sharing

 

Starwind v2v image converter

http://starwindfreev2vconverter.en.softonic.com/

 

Make the folowing selection in starwind

Image format: VMware pre-allocated image

Virtual disk type: IDE

 

 

Hi

 

Can you please detail how you install the vmdk onto the ESXi after you did the conversion. I tried to follow the guide and always get

 

GRUB Loading Error 22

 

Thank you.

 

Ok, now I get to the point with the "Synology Web Assistant" " Installing DiskStation Manager" "Initializing" and I get the following error :

 

"An error occur during installation. The telnet service of DiskStation is turn on ...."

 

The difference is that I am using a 20 GB VMFS virtual disk on SCSI0:0 with Type: Paravirtual

 

Thanks

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I was using iscsi on my xpenology esxi box before I broke my data volume partitions. It worked fine for me, although I had never used iscsi before, so I had to do some reading to figure it out.

 

My ESXi consists of 2 VM's:

Synology NAS

Windows 8 w/ Windows Media Center (my HTPC).

 

I created an iscsi on the NAS so I can set it as my record drive for TV in the WMC VM. It worked well except for the part I had to manually connect the iSCSI on windows after each reboot (must be a bug, or I don't know what I am doing :razz: ).

 

Here's my custom Lian Li Q16 which is now my ESXI box. https://picasaweb.google.com/1049792069 ... ianLiPCQ16

 

except the box consists of the following now:

Intel DQ77KB
Intel i7 3770T 45W CPU
Crucial 2 x 8GB SODIMM DDR3
MyDigitalSSD 64GB Smart Series SATA III (6G) SandForce mSATA SSD - ESXI Install and Datastore
Samsung F4 HD204UI 2TB x 4 - Synology SHR Array
SilconDust HD Prime Network Cablecard Tuner
Xbox 360 WMC extender to watch TV

 

Hey Diverge i'm also running a dq77kb. The dq77kb is perfect for esxi, i'm running it with a x4 HBA card and 2 additional GigE NIC's on the full/half height mini-pcie slots. Are you using Vga passthrough for your HTPC?

 

Nope, I haven't passed anything through. For the HTPC part, my Windows 8 VM isn't even activated. The activation nagging is no bother, since it's not even used locally. It only serves as my WMC host. I use an Xbox 360 in WMC extender mode (that remotely uses the WMC on the win 8 VM), that's connected to my TV.

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Hi

 

Can you please detail how you install the vmdk onto the ESXi after you did the conversion. I tried to follow the guide and always get

 

GRUB Loading Error 22

 

Thank you.

 

Ok, now I get to the point with the "Synology Web Assistant" " Installing DiskStation Manager" "Initializing" and I get the following error :

 

"An error occur during installation. The telnet service of DiskStation is turn on ...."

 

The difference is that I am using a 20 GB VMFS virtual disk on SCSI0:0 with Type: Paravirtual

 

Thanks

 

Can you post a screenshot of the VM settings properties window

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I was using iscsi on my xpenology esxi box before I broke my data volume partitions. It worked fine for me, although I had never used iscsi before, so I had to do some reading to figure it out.

 

My ESXi consists of 2 VM's:

Synology NAS

Windows 8 w/ Windows Media Center (my HTPC).

 

I created an iscsi on the NAS so I can set it as my record drive for TV in the WMC VM. It worked well except for the part I had to manually connect the iSCSI on windows after each reboot (must be a bug, or I don't know what I am doing :razz: ).

 

Here's my custom Lian Li Q16 which is now my ESXI box. https://picasaweb.google.com/1049792069 ... ianLiPCQ16

 

except the box consists of the following now:

Intel DQ77KB
Intel i7 3770T 45W CPU
Crucial 2 x 8GB SODIMM DDR3
MyDigitalSSD 64GB Smart Series SATA III (6G) SandForce mSATA SSD - ESXI Install and Datastore
Samsung F4 HD204UI 2TB x 4 - Synology SHR Array
SilconDust HD Prime Network Cablecard Tuner
Xbox 360 WMC extender to watch TV

 

Hey Diverge i'm also running a dq77kb. The dq77kb is perfect for esxi, i'm running it with a x4 HBA card and 2 additional GigE NIC's on the full/half height mini-pcie slots. Are you using Vga passthrough for your HTPC?

 

Nope, I haven't passed anything through. For the HTPC part, my Windows 8 VM isn't even activated. The activation nagging is no bother, since it's not even used locally. It only serves as my WMC host. I use an Xbox 360 in WMC extender mode (that remotely uses the WMC on the win 8 VM), that's connected to my TV.

 

 

 

After my post yesterday i downgraded to esxi 5.0 U2 and video passthrough is now working with an AMD 7750. 1080p video plays perfectly, i might just replace my current htpc with this VM.

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Is there any documentation to explain how to add LSI SAS drivers to this build? Or perhaps maybe someone could include them in the next build? LSI SAS2008 specifically in my case.

 

When I try to pass through my LSI SAS card via VT-d I get an error on boot and it hangs. As soon as I remove the passthrough it boots up fine.

 

I'd rather not use RDM as I like having SMART features.

 

 

UPDATE: I also tried my other SAS card -- Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8 (Marvell 6480 chipset) via VT-D and it didn't detect any drives at all. Support for either card would be dandy. If I have to compile it myself I will.

593ef3ad4c521_ScreenShot2013-08-02at11_15_46PM.png.ff0c1a8bdb9b7a6479d16e1a0a459947.png

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Is there any documentation to explain how to add LSI SAS drivers to this build? Or perhaps maybe someone could include them in the next build? LSI SAS2008 specifically in my case.

 

When I try to pass through my LSI SAS card via VT-d I get an error on boot and it hangs. As soon as I remove the passthrough it boots up fine.

 

I'd rather not use RDM as I like having SMART features.

 

You can only passthrough your onboard sata to DSM.

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Actually, tuatara got his M1015 (flashed to IT mode) working in pass through. Do you still have the stock firmware on the lsi2008 or did you flash it to IT mode?

 

Thats good news, what DSM version is he running

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Actually, tuatara got his M1015 (flashed to IT mode) working in pass through. Do you still have the stock firmware on the lsi2008 or did you flash it to IT mode?

 

I would love to know what firmware his card is running and what settings he used (in esxi and in his card bios) and what build he is using.

 

Mine is running in IT mode FW: 11.00.00.00 / BIOS: 7.21.00.00 / 22-AUG-11 (LSI P11), but I'll flash it to whatever mode I need to if it'll work via passthrough.

 

I got bored and setup 2x3tb last night via RDM, but I'd love to do it via VT-d.

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