VIRTUALIZATION

Setting up the virtual machine environment in ESXi 5.0 is fairly straight forward. Like ESXi 4.0, ESXi 5.0 is managed remotely via the vSphere 5.0 hypervisor client. I’ve assigned a static IP address to the whitebox ESXi. Using the assigned IP address and the user credentials created in the ESXi 5.0 settings menu, we can use VMware’s vSphere 5.0 Hypervisor client to connect to the whitebox ESXi server over the network. I installed vSphere 5.0 on my trusty Zenbook UX21E to access the whitebox ESXi server remotely.

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After logging into vSphere 5.0, the first thing you will see is a category screen, with options to see your inventory (your ESXi server), roles (users), and system logs. From inventory, you can select your ESXi server.

After selecting the whitebox server, you are given several tabbed options, one of which is “Summary”, which gives you an overall hardware description of your ESXi server. Details such as processor model, motherboard model, CPU cores, CPU usage, memory usage, etc., are listed. With the whitebox setup that I am utilizing, what’s probably the most interesting part of this section is that ESXi 5.0 is reporting that DirectPath I/O (IOMMU) is supported (woot!) on the GA-970A-UD3, which allows us to passthrough hardware devices directly to the VMs. Not too many consumer motherboards support this feature, which makes this even more exciting.

Moving on, before you can start creating VMs, a storage space must be created. As this whitebox server has two hard drives (a Seagate Barracuda ES 1 TB 7200 RPM and WD 80 GB 7200 RPM SATA HDD), we can assign storage spaces to these devices by going to the “Configuration” tab and selecting “Storage”. Here in this section, there is an option to “Add Storage”, in which we can specify a storage device to utilize. Clicking on this option, it gives us a choice to select the type of storage, such as a local disk, iSCSI, etc. or a Network File System (NFS), but  simplicity of this setup, we will be using the local drives installed on this server. In the next screen, a list of all detected hard drives will be shown, from which we can select a hard drive to create a storage space. After selecting a drive, an option to specify whether to utilize VMFS-5 or VMFS-3 will be shown. As I won’t be utilizing legacy operating systems that have issue utilizing storage spaces larger than 2TB, I selected VMFS-5. After going through the storage spaces setup prompts, your newly created storage space will show up in the “Storages” section. Please note that this must be done every time if you wish to utilize additional storage devices.

With a storage space created, we can now create virtual machines! In the “Virtual Machines” section, we can create a new VM. In the new VM wizard, we can specify if it is a typical or custom VM. The “Typical” option used for common operating systems such as Windows XP, whereas the “Custom” option is used for situations where additional options need to be specified, or in cases where a unsupported OS will be installed. From here, we can specify options such as the name of the VM, the VM OS type (i.e. Windows, Linux, Other), the storage space it will be installed to, the network type & adapter that will be utilized, and the amount of storage space assigned to the VM. Once all of these options have been confirmed, ESXi 5.0 will take a moment to create the VM onto the storage space that you have specified.

Once the VM has been created, it will appear in the “Virtual Machines” list. You can make changes to the VM’s virtualized hardware, such additional storage space, optical drives, network options, etc. I decided to install Windows Server 2008 as my first VM, as I want to experiment with some of the  server roles like Active Directory, Domain Controller, Sharepoint, SQL, etc. Through the optical device options of the VM, I selected the Windows Server 2008 ISO image, from which to boot from to initialize the installation. Within the VM, I went through the typical Windows Server 2008 installation wizard, which progressed without any issues. After twenty minutes of installation, the Windows Server 2008 VM was ready to be utilized!

In the next portion, I will go over more detail in managing multiple VMs on ESXi 5.0.

After a busy week, I managed to find some time to install ESXi 5.0 on the whitebox server that I recently finished constructing. For those looking to try out ESXi 5.0, a non-commercial license is freely available for download on VMware’s website. You can find it here: Download VMware vSphere Hypervisor for Free

With two SATA hard drives (a Seagate 1 TB 7200 RPM HDD and a WD 80 GB 7200 RPM HDD) and a Kingston 4 GB SDHC card on hand, I proceeded to install ESXi 5.0 directly onto the Kingston 4 GB SDHC card. Now, some may ask, “Why install ESXi on a SD card?” First, the installation requirements for ESXi 5.0 are pretty low and can easily fit on a 4 GB SDHC card. Second, I can easily backup the ESXi contents of the SDHC card. Third, I can easily update ESXi to later versions on the SDHC card without having to mess with the configuration of the other hard drives.

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The ESXi 5.0 installer is fairly straight-forward. As long as you are using a chipset and storage controller that ESXi 5.0 recognizes, the installer will detect all of your storage devices and will ask which storage device to install ESXi 5.0 onto. Please note that there is a known issue with the ESXi installer if you are using an IDE CD/DVD drive; the workaround is to install from a SATA CD/DVD drive or a removable drive. The installer had no problem detecting and installing ESXi 5.0 directly to the Kingston SDHC card.

After installing ESXi 5.0 to the Kingston SDHC card, I rebooted the whitebox server and set the BIOS settings on the server to automatically boot from the SDHC card. ESXi 5.0 had no issues booting and detected everything, including the onboard Realtek RTL8111E gigabit NIC (another reason why I chose to utilize the Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 motherboard). After setting an static IP address for the server, I put it into “headless mode” (monitor-less), as ESXi is managed remotely via the VMware vSphere Hypervisor, not directly. In the next virtualization post, I will be going over on setting up the VM resources and VMs in the vSphere Hypervisor.

For some time, I’ve been contemplating on building a new whitebox server for ESXi 5.0, as I have always been interested in virtualization. I built a ESXi 4.2 whitebox server last summer, in which I was able to get myself familiarized with ESXi and the VMware vSphere Hypervisor client. There were a lot of great features in ESXi 4.2, but my whitebox server at the time was limited in that it didn’t support advanced features such as PCI passthrough (Intel VT-d/IOMMU). My upcoming ESXi 5.0 whitebox server project will be different, as I will be utilizing components that supports IOMMU.

Gathering spare parts that I already had on hand, as well as purchasing a few cost effective parts, I’ve assembled all that I need to build and test ESXi 5.0 in a home-lab environment. The goal of this project is familiarize myself with the features of ESXi 5.0, as well as exploring advanced virtualization features like IOMMU.

Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 830 ($49.99 @ Microcenter)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-970A-UD3 ($109.99 @ Microcenter)
RAM: 2 x G.Skill F3-12800CL9D-8GBSR Sniper 8 GB (2 x 4 GB) DDR3 1600 (Spare Part)
Storage Drives:
Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1 TB 7200 RPM SATA HDD (Spare Part)
Western Digital WD800AAJS 80 GB 7200 RPM SATA HDD (Spare Part)
Kingston 4 GB SDHC Card (Spare Part)
Vantec 58-in-1 Internal Card Reader
Graphics: Diablotek VARX-8P ATi Rage XL 8MB SDRAM PCI Video Card ($11.96 @ Microcenter)
Network: Realtek RTL8111E (Onboard)
Optical: 2 x LITE-ON 24X DVD+-RW Drive (Spare Part)
Power Supply Unit: Corsair CMPSU-430CX 430W PSU (Spare Part)
Case: Thermal Master TC-102 ($36.99 @ Microcenter)

The requirements of ESXi 5.0 are largely the same as those of ESXi 4.x, in that it requires a x64-capable CPU and a supported chipset, NIC, and storage controller. vm-help.com has an excellent ESXi whitebox component compatibility list, which can be found here.

It can be tricky to find out which motherboards support VT-d/IOMMU, as very few consumer motherboards support this feature. With the help of the whitebox suggestions over at vm-help.com, I was able to find a Socket AM3+ IOMMU capable motherboard, the Gigabyte GA-970-UD3. According to AMD’s technical specs, the AMD 970, 990X, and 990FX series all support IOMMU, but true support is largely dependent if the option is actually available in the BIOS settings and working correctly.

ESXi 5.0 Whitebox Server... fully constructed.

As I continue to explore several ESXi features, I will be adding additional parts onto this build as needed, but for now, these components will do. In the next several posts, I will go over the installation procedure for ESXi 5.0.