We are preparing for our first virtualization server. We might have about 10 VMs on the below server hardware. We will be using one of our current Dell PowerEdge T420 server ( RAID 10, 192GB RAM, 4x600GB SAS 15K ) I was reading some articles online and many of them are saying it will be good (or) OK to install ESXi 5.5 on a SD card. Here are my options: Option 1: Install ESXi 5.5 on RAID 10 ( 4 x 600GB SAS 15K) drives Option 2: Buy a 'Internal Dell SD Module' for our server with 4GB SD card. Install ESXi 5.5 on above SD module.

Questions: 1) Which option do you recommend? 2) Will there be any performance issue if we go with option 1? 3) Online articles were talking about storing some vmware logs on RAID instead of SD module? What exactly is it?

Any other suggestions and recommendations are appreciated. Hey SavingPrivateRyan! Congrats on building your first virtualization server! It is a crazy ride, let me tell you! In reading this thread, a couple things stood out.let me address them point by point: • Install ESXi on mirrored hard drives: This is your first thought when installing ESXi as this is the way you have always done it with physical servers. I built my first VMware host this way many years ago too. But today, things are different.

• Installing ESXi on a flash drive: This is 100% supported by VMware today. I recommend this option to anyone that asks me today. Reasons to do so are in the next point. • What about speed if I install on a flash drive?: As ChrisBac said in his post, ESXi loads itself into RAM when your host boots up. RAM is so much quicker than SSD, HDD or any other media you could install it to.

ESXi only writes to whatever media it is installed to when there are changes, there is no constant read/write as it runs completely in RAM. So speed of media that ESXi is installed to is a moot point. • What happens if my flash drives gets corrupted: OK, in most cases, your host will throw some errors but will not crash. If you tried a reboot, then it may not boot up (depending on what is corrupted). You get a new flash drive, re-install ESXi and either restore a config you have backed up or build your host again. You have a single host, so rebuilding from scratch will not take long at all. And when I say 'rebuilding' I mean re-installing ESXi, adding your datastore and configuring any virtual settings.

Aug 17, 2016. Advisory: (Revision) VMware - Unable to Install VMware ESXi 5.x and 6.x Using HP Custom Image June 2015 Build with the HPVSA Driver Version 5.x.0.98 for the HP Dynamic Smart Array RAID Controller. NOTICE: The information in this document, including products and software versions, is current as of. Edit: the ESXi installation was tried with RAID and without RAID, same problem. When configuring RAID, the disks are recognized. You will not see the software raid device to install on. We even met this problem when installing Windows Server 2008 (in order to install Hyper-V), with and without RAID 5 config.

You will NOT have to rebuild your Virtual machines if only the flash drive has been corrupted. If you use all your spinning disks for your datastore, then all your VMs will be there and ready to go once you get the host back up and running.

If you run a pretty vanilla host, you can get back up and going in 20 minutes (if that). Sounds like you have a pretty good machine for your first host.

That said, you only have 4 HDDs that will net your 1.2TB of storage for all your VMs. Not sure what you are planning on running, but 192GB of RAM is quite a bit for 10 VMs with only two spindles cranking out IOPs. I would fully pop that chassis out with as much storage as you can. More spindles will give you better performance! Virtualization is like a drug, once you start, the opportunities to virtualize will just keep coming up.

Better to try and plan ahead with storage (as I see that being a bottleneck in this build) so you can support the inevitable sprawl that will happen. So Darren, what would you do? Glad you asked! I would buy a couple of mack-daddy processors (as much as my budget could afford), the RAM you have covered, and fill that chassis up with as many HDs as would fit and configure them into one RAID 10 volume. Install ESXi on a flash drive and create one datastore from the volume you created.

Led Zeppelin Live In London 2007 Download Dvd Burner. Then I would start cranking our VMs via either P2V or creating a template and deploying them from that. Oh, and I would always have fun, as life is wasted unless you are having fun.:) Seriously, if you have any questions on your journey, there are a ton of folks here that are way smarter than I am, but I do have a couple of brain cells kicking around in my noggin, let me know if I can be of any help to you! I would suggest an option 3. Install ESXi on a USB drive and boot the server from it. Why waste the drive space on your array to have it run ESXi when it could run VMs instead?

If you are running ESXi from a USB drive or SD card and those devices fail, you loose the ability to save any changes made to the configuration. But if they fail while ESXi is running, the server will still run and function normally. You could easily then get another USB drive and rebuild the config (or have one that you taped to the server rack that was a copy of your original config to get you going). Hey SavingPrivateRyan! Congrats on building your first virtualization server!

It is a crazy ride, let me tell you! In reading this thread, a couple things stood out.let me address them point by point: • Install ESXi on mirrored hard drives: This is your first thought when installing ESXi as this is the way you have always done it with physical servers. I built my first VMware host this way many years ago too. But today, things are different. • Installing ESXi on a flash drive: This is 100% supported by VMware today. I recommend this option to anyone that asks me today.

Reasons to do so are in the next point. • What about speed if I install on a flash drive?: As ChrisBac said in his post, ESXi loads itself into RAM when your host boots up. RAM is so much quicker than SSD, HDD or any other media you could install it to. ESXi only writes to whatever media it is installed to when there are changes, there is no constant read/write as it runs completely in RAM.

So speed of media that ESXi is installed to is a moot point. • What happens if my flash drives gets corrupted: OK, in most cases, your host will throw some errors but will not crash. If you tried a reboot, then it may not boot up (depending on what is corrupted). You get a new flash drive, re-install ESXi and either restore a config you have backed up or build your host again.

You have a single host, so rebuilding from scratch will not take long at all. And when I say 'rebuilding' I mean re-installing ESXi, adding your datastore and configuring any virtual settings. You will NOT have to rebuild your Virtual machines if only the flash drive has been corrupted. If you use all your spinning disks for your datastore, then all your VMs will be there and ready to go once you get the host back up and running. If you run a pretty vanilla host, you can get back up and going in 20 minutes (if that).

Sounds like you have a pretty good machine for your first host. That said, you only have 4 HDDs that will net your 1.2TB of storage for all your VMs.

Not sure what you are planning on running, but 192GB of RAM is quite a bit for 10 VMs with only two spindles cranking out IOPs. I would fully pop that chassis out with as much storage as you can.

More spindles will give you better performance! Virtualization is like a drug, once you start, the opportunities to virtualize will just keep coming up. Better to try and plan ahead with storage (as I see that being a bottleneck in this build) so you can support the inevitable sprawl that will happen. So Darren, what would you do? Glad you asked! I would buy a couple of mack-daddy processors (as much as my budget could afford), the RAM you have covered, and fill that chassis up with as many HDs as would fit and configure them into one RAID 10 volume.

Install ESXi on a flash drive and create one datastore from the volume you created. Then I would start cranking our VMs via either P2V or creating a template and deploying them from that. Oh, and I would always have fun, as life is wasted unless you are having fun.:) Seriously, if you have any questions on your journey, there are a ton of folks here that are way smarter than I am, but I do have a couple of brain cells kicking around in my noggin, let me know if I can be of any help to you!