Since I passed the Windows test, I’ve reinstalled ESXi 5.5 on my Dell 1950. It’s nice to be able to run multiple VMs on one system each providing a dedicated service! The downsides are they eat memory and hard drive space like crazy.
I’ve found that when I’ve been deploying a VM from an OVA, the creator typically provisions the VM with 16 GB of space. This would normally be fine if I had a large storage cluster or lots of space on my host, but I only have a pair of 74 GB HDDs in the Dell 1950. I also like deploying the VMs with a thick provisioned disk which increases performance. Obviously, when you have 140 GB of space you run out of space quickly when deploying 16GB virtual disks. Luckily, I’ve been able to fit Centos 6.5 comfortably in a 5GB virtual disk, and have been doing that quite a bit to stretch my storage needs.
In the short term, I’m getting my IBM x305 online with it’s pair of 1 TB WD RED drives as a NFS. Most of this space will go to Plex/Bittorrent storage. I’m also converting my HP DL360G4 with it’s pair of 74 GB 1500RPM SCSI drives to a NFS to store more VM disks. I plan on putting higher priority VM disks on the internal server and lower priority VM disks on the DL360G4. I’ve been hearing bad things about ESXi and NFS due to it only opening a single connection (which limits speed if you bond NICs) and that iSCSI is preferred, but I want to be able to use the storage disks for other uses and not dedicate it all to ESXi. I think the *limits* should be ok for my uses, but I’ll be doing some more work before I dive in fully.
On the memory front, I have 16 GB spread across 4 banks at the moment. Yep, I’m complaining that 16 GB of memory isn’t enough. With only 5-7 VMs running, I’m already running into memory issues. I’m going to upgrade with another 4×4 GB memory banks bringing me to a total of 32 GB. I’m not 100% sure this is enough. Should it not be enough, I need to decide if it’s worth purchasing another Dell 1950 or upgrading to 48/64 GB of memory. Buying another Dell allows me to spread the services across two servers and allow me to play with clustering. Upping the memory allows me to keep electricity costs down and is slightly cheaper.
Oh well, I’m learning so much about virtualization with ESXi!