New host: Dell PowerEdge R710
So, it was time to make the virtualization a bit more serious and the same time solve my hosting problem. After a quick survey of the hardware available, I bought a Dell PowerEdge R710:
- Chassis: 2U
- CPU: 2x Intel E5520 2.26GHz 8MB L3
- RAM: 24GB UDIMM at 1066MHz
- PERC 6/I RAID controller
- 6x Western Digital Black (WD1001FALS) in RAID6
- NIC: 4x Broadcom BCM5709C
- Redundant 870W PSU
- OS: VMware ESXi 4.0 Installable
VMware ESXi is installed to a bootable USB memory stick installed in an internal reader. Usually, it should be installed to an internal SD card reader, but the reader were not available at the time of order.
Pictures of the R710 is available at http://gallery.slappfisk.net/v/2009/R710/.
The installation process was a bit different from the one that Duncan describes in his post. The USB memory stick shows up as an internal hard drive when enabled in the BIOS. The rest of the installation process is easy as you can load the ESXi image from a CD to the memory stick.
Posted: June 10th, 2009 under Hardware, VMware by Frode.
Comments: 2
Comments
Comment from Marno
Time: June 18, 2009, 12:08 pm
Hi Frode,
I’m currently in the process of getting a new server for ESX, would you recommend the Dell 2850 as a test ESX server? Specs:
2x Intel Xeon 3Ghz cpu
8Gb DDR2 ram (4×2)
Perc 4e DI array controller6x 72Gb disk 15k rpm (plaats voor 6 st)
Adaptec 39160 scsi kaart
After reading http://communities.vmware.com/message/1065335 I’m doubting the performance of this server. Could you please let me know how it performs? I want to use this as a test server hosting about 4 servers (1 domain controller, 1 Windows XP workstation, 2 servers for testing). No heavy (production) load or anything like that, just testing.
I would really appreciate some feedback, thanks in advance & nice blog!!
Greets Marno
Comment from Frode Sandholtbråten
Time: June 18, 2009, 10:09 pm
Hey,
I have had four VM’s running on my PE2850 with 3GHz, 7Gig ram and 4x 73Gig 10kRPM disk drives:
mail/web/file server (linux 2.6.x)
login server (linux 2.6.x)
windows 2003 R2 terminal server with VMware vCenter
seti compute client (linux 2.6.x)
Performance have never been an issue. It was never an issue when I used it exclusively for the mail/web/file server and it has never been an issue after I installed VMware ESXi.
On the other hand, the PowerEdge 2850 isn’t the best virtualization host. It lacks support for hardware virtualization and will not, as far as I know, run 64bit guests. The CPU’s are first generation 64bit processors and are therefore not very well suited for running virtualization software. I only use it because I already have the PE2850 and are doing the virtualization research as a hobby.
The performance issues could be because of a number of things: the lack of IO-MMU support, memory controller issues, cache sync problems and hyperthreading.
My advice is that you should look at the next generation (10th or 11th) if you want to play around with virtualization. The PowerEdge R200, which I also have) supports 8Gig of RAM, hardware virtualization and such. They are also cheap.
If you get the PE2850 for free, feel free to play around with it, but it is not the best machine for virtualization.
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