The hardware
It's a whole flash ESXi setup with three SSD drives:
- Intel 530 SSD drive (240 GB) on main bay
- Intel 530 SSD drive (240 GB) on the Upgrade Bay
- Sumsang EVO mSATA 256 GB
Some bios changes before installing:
- Disable the VGA adapter auto switch. otherwise you won't even be able to boot the installer
- Use ACHI mode instead of RAID for SATA Mode. otherwise you can't use mSATA for VM Machines
I put 32 GB SO-DIMM DDR3L (8GB x 4) on the laptop, working together with the Quad core i-7 Harshwell Processor it should be good supporting few VMs running simultaneously. boot drive is on a 8 GB USB thumb drive.
To install ESXi, download the 6.0 U1 Generic image instead of any custom image. You can choose to boot from another thumb drive, or like me I put the boot image on TFTP server so it does PXE boot from network.
The installation went pretty smooth with 6.0 u1 image, and it discovers the Intel I217 NIC automatically. I also installed the vCenter appliance inside the ESXi so I can use the vSphere web interface. You can certainly use the vSphere client package on Windows machine but that doesn't support all the features anymore.
Secondary Giga NIC Adapter (Thunderbolt)
I was also managed to add a second NIC adapter using the Thunderbolt port on my ZBook. Based on some KB from VMware that since ESXi 6.0 the Apple Thunderbolt NIC adapter is supported by the Broadcom tg3 driver, however it didn't get recognized even by 6.0 u1 build 3029759. I had to upgrade to build 3073146 to use it properly.
Now I'm running 5 VMs (Win + Linux) and I'm pretty happy with the setup. In the past I was always feel like wasting a lot computing powers from my ZBook now it has bigger responsibilities.
iSCSI from NAS using RDM
The three SSD drives do not have any redundancy. I tried to use NFS (v4) to provision VM but it extremely slow. only installing VMTool it took over half hour. there might be some NFS parameters need further tuned but I rather not going that far. I then created few 100 GB iSCSI targets from my NAS Storage, which is Raid 5 array across 4 WD RED drives (Octa-core Avoton/32GB ECC RAM). I use RDM to map each iSCSI drive directly to the VM I want to attach, and it indeed runs much faster than NFS storage. iSCSI traffic on it's own Network (good to have multiple NICs on both Storage & ESXi), and it's much faster than any rotational 2.5 drives.
5 comments:
Did you manage to have the ZBook boot the ESXi 6.0 from the internal SSD?
I somewhat could not achieve this, resulting in putting a low-profile USB-Stick (Sandisk Cruzer Fit) into one USB Port and booting from that device.
Which SSD? mSATA or 2.5 inch SATA? It should be ok as long as you switched from RAID mode to AHCI
There is only one 2,5" SSD mounted and of course, AHCI is enabled.
i liked the above post and i need to buy one laptop from hp brand
hp laptops price
Thanks for sharing the best information and suggestions, I love your content, and they are very nice and very useful to us. If you are looking for the best HP Ireland Sale, then visit On Sale Now. I appreciate the work you have put into this.
Post a Comment