VMWare ESX v3.5 on Cheap PC Hardware
January 14, 2008
As eric and some people here and here very helpfully pointed out last week the HP Compaq D530 desktop PC has hardware that is compatible with ESX 3.5’s new SATA drivers.
I managed to get a 2.8GHz HT one from eBay with 4Gb RAM and a 500Gb SATA disk for approx £315 GBP delivered, including VAT.
And I’m pleased to report ESX installed 1st time straight from the CD, no fiddling required, this is very handy as until about 6 months ago I had a Compaq ML570 G1 (4x 700 MHz Xeon CPU and 12Gb RAM plus external disk shelf) which was fine until my electricity supplier caught up with the fact they had been seriously under-billing me for my electricity consumption, so the rather large bill for running it for a year led to it’s powering down for a majority of the time.
I’m in the process of migrating all my home VM’s from VMWare Server (I used to run Windows as the actual host OS) to ESX 3.5.. don’t have a “proper” licence yet, but I will do at some point before the eval times out, with the power saving it will more than pay for itself!
Whilst this is lowly desktop PC hardware it uses about 1/8th of the power of the ML570 and performance is probably on-par.. although slower disks (I previously had 14 x 18Gb U3 SCSI for my VM volumes)
Will post more results when I’ve finished, seriously considering picking up another one and enabling vMotion; I’ve used OpenFiler in the past to get a reasonable iSCSI “SAN” up and running - although I suspect my very old Cisco 10/100 hub is going to need replacing next!
Why? you might ask - well, because I can and my Garage has rack-space 
I’ve always had a decent sized home network, maybe I’ll blog about what I run at home later and it’s always handy to “eat your own dogfood“ - I work with this stuff, so it’s useful to use it myself and have something I can rip apart/trash as required without having to buy expensive hardware or fill out lots of change-control forms!
Please could you post the hardware you used; whether you used scsi or sas/sata would be interesting.
I just used the onboard SATA controller and NIC, I used a 500Gb SATA drive plugged into the onboard controller; the main reason I like this solution is that there are no external cards required - the on board devices (NIC/SATA) are supported by ESX 3.5 out of the box
Virtual Centre says the following about the ESX PC
Manufacturer: HP
Model: HP d530 SFF (DC578AV)
Processors: 1 CPU x 2.792 GHz
Processor Type Intel(R) Pentium(R)4 CPU 2.80GHz
Hyperthreading: Active
I purchased mine via this eBay link and just asked the supplier for the upgrades http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/HP-Compaq-D530-P4-HT-2-8GHz-SFF-PC-40GB-512MB-DVD-XP_W0QQitemZ290197178812QQihZ019QQcategoryZ179QQcmdZViewItem
[...] Choose the ESX host where you want to run it - I only have 1 which is my desktop ESX server (http://vinf.net/2008/01/14/vmware-esx-v35-on-cheap-pc-hardware/) [...]
The ESX System requirements states that you need two drives. One for the OS and one for the VMs. Can you please specify whether you have two drives or just one?
I just have a single 500Gb SATA drive in this box and it works out of the box, no hackery required - it’s partitioned by the installer to give seperate OS/data/swap etc. partitions.
I’ve installed ESX on “proper” SCSI/SAS servers with single drives with no issue.
Thanks
I have (Much to the anoyance of the wife) purchase 2 x DL580 quad Xeon 3Ghz plus an MSA500G2 all from ebay. got the MSA500 (Still boxed) for an incredable £700 Managed to get ESX up and running very quickly and started playing with VMOTION works fine (Though is not entirely happy that the VMOTION kernal is running on a 100Mbit network. I’ll pick up an gigabit switch soon. I would be interested in any performance tips or even better how to get network SAN connected so I can backup the VM’s any backup tips in general would be grately appreceated
Ash
Nice setup for home!
Only thing you might want to watch is your power costs if you are running that at home - thats prob going to draw about 800W so if you run it 24/7 thats going to cost you (depending on your local power costs etc.) that could prob cost about £2k/year in power! which is why I switched to my D530 setup in the end (oh, that and EDF has been estimating my meter reading for a year but didn’t actually tell me..grr!)
in terms of performance/setup I’ve not done much with an MSA500 - I think thats SCSI attached, rather than fibre channel?
To back up VM’s you’ll need a host using VCB to proxy backup connections, which isn’t going to work well (I think) as you’ve already got the max of 2 SCSI attached devices.
FastSCP from veeam is another option - its easy to copy off the VMs to another host over Ethernet (via COS interface) not quite as high-tech/production as SAN level/proxy backup but it works they also have a backup version - http://veeam.com/vmware-esx-backup.html
Good luck!
Out of curiosity, How much did your electric bill go down? I am currently running ESX on Dell 1500SC servers and they range about $50 bucks each a month to run 24/7 (and don’t do much other than serve as my playground).
CARLO
Hard to say exactly as it was tied in with our normal household power consumption which was being incorrectly estimated… but based on our current bills and historical usage I would say switching to the D530 knocked at least £1000 (GBP) off our annual power bill (basically cutting it almost in half..!)
[...] have been reading many articles over the last few months such as those by vinf.net and Ryan Coates who have blogged about their experiences building their own VMWare ESX test [...]
Do you know if D530 will work with ESXi?
I’m a VMware newbie. Just building a VMware sandpit at home. ESX 3.5 installed succesfully on an HP dx6100mt. Any suggestions on suitable NICs so I can increase the number of vmnics on the box (I want to play with nic teaming etc.)
Gareht
[...] http://vinf.net/2008/01/14/vmware-esx-v35-on-cheap-pc-hardware/ [...]
Have you upgraded your home lab to accomadate the 64 Bit requirements of ESX4? I’m in the process of tracking down hardware that will be supported and was curious if you have done that yet..
Thanks.
CARLO.
Regarding the MSA500 (G2 is what I have) and its connections, although not on the HCL, it has the same capabilities for connections as the MSA1000, which are options of having four 68 pin LVD connections by replacing the dual connection card, as well as a FC connection on each controller (if you spring for the redundant controller). It also has slots for the MSA FC fabric switch (8 ports) which works great. It also is upgradeable to an MSA1000, which is the path I chose since I got the 500 so cheaply.
The really cool thing about it is that it is FC SAN and I am able to use the same Qlogic HBAs as I work with in the ‘real world’ for SAN connectivity in an ESX world and is relatively cheap on eBay, cheap compared to FC SAN in general that is. So when I need to validate things that require actual FC SAN, or stay up to date with technology that requires shared storage, I’m able to do so nicely. But I remain hooked on iSCSI (Linux based targets with U320 SCSI arrays) and have seen very little reason to use FC SAN with the exception of very heavy disk I/O loads.
md