Updated VMware / Home Lab setup. Page 2

Updated VMware / Home Lab setup. Page 2
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watts3000 @ 30th Nov 06:12PM:
Re: Updated VMware / Home Lab setup.

I have not been able to obtain line speed of gig and I'm running it on a dell poweredge 2950 4 gigs of ram and 6 300 gig 15k sas drives. I plan on doing more testing and tweaks to try to get the speed up. BTW what are you going to do about a layer 3 switch
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anon @ 30th Nov 09:36PM:
Re: Updated VMware / Home Lab setup.

what type of speeds are you getting? While the ESX service console supports jumbo frames, the VMKernel does not. Meaning ISCSI on VMWare does not currently support JUMBO frames. There are a few tweaks you can run via command line to enable them on the vswitch and VMKernel.

Do your poweredge have ISCSI and TCP/IP offload engine?
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GREMBLING22 @ 1st Dec 11:57PM:
Re: Updated VMware / Home Lab setup.

I was finally able to mess around with some settings and was able to get my intel adapter to hit 85MB/s. Im happy with that but im hoping for more.
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lightspd @ 8th Dec 04:14PM:
Re: Updated VMware / Home Lab setup.

Wow, that is an awesome deal you got for all the hardware! So what is the overall power draw of the whole setup? All you need now is a second filer so that you can do storage vmotion :)
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GREMBLING22 @ 8th Dec 09:02PM:
Re: Updated VMware / Home Lab setup.

As my setup progresses the whole setup will be moved to a datacenter where she can enjoy 10/Mbps unmetered bandwidth on a multi-homed facility. The best part of the whole thing is it will be racked in the same facility I presently work in. Although not being in the same room as the equipment I monitor, the servers will be a few doors away so if problems do arise i can walk over and check it out.

Overall the power draw is around 570 watts idle, I haven't gone into testing them under full load. Considering the last dual core dual proc. board with 24GB of ram and attached Dell storage array with 8x74GB U320 15K drives drew about 420watts I am more then impressed that 4 dual proc quad core servers draw only a little more power. Keep in mind each server recieved 400 watt 80 + certified PSU's which I swear by... they really do make a difference.

Right now I look at my weak point as being the ISCSI box. All storage is shared and therefor obviously if that box goes down all servers come to a halt. Does openfiler offer some sort or mirrored backup for ISCSI that would kick in if the primary server went down?
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GREMBLING22 @ 27th Dec 02:16AM:
Re: Updated VMware / Home Lab setup.

My ESX capture with HA and DRS enabled on a cluster of 2 ESX hosts.

I have quite a few pics I was hoping to upload but I broke the mini usb interface on my cam. As soon as the card reader comes in I will be adding the pics of the build.

lightspd @ 28th Dec 05:01PM:
Re: Updated VMware / Home Lab setup.

I don't know anything much about openfiler besides the fact that it is linux-based. If you're lucky that means it supports DRBD which would allow you to have a real-time mirror on a second server. DRBD is effectively network RAID1. You might then be able to use multipath ISCSI to achieve transparent failover if the main storage server dies for some reason.

I don't use vmware myself, but have a DRBD + OCFS2 home-made SAN that works on vaguely similar principles.
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GREMBLING22 @ 22nd Jan 01:13AM:
Re: Updated VMware / Home Lab setup.

Well after a firmware update to my P800 SAS controller it is no longer supported by openfiler and I cannot use it.

I received my Infiniband cables, switch and hca cards last week. I was able to get the OpenIB over IP drivers installed on ESX. Esx now recognzes 2 storage adapters and 2 network adapters (my cards are dual port) at a network speed of 10000. Openfiler detected the cards but I was unable to install the drivers. I now need to get a copy of Redhat EL install the infinband drivers on that.

Instead of using ISCSI for storage i will be using the infiniband RDMA which does not have the same overhead as iscsi.