Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind

For a while now , i have been thinking about building a Lab Server at home , that will save me time and effort for my day to day dev and other tech stuff. and decided to go with VMWare’s ESXi solution for a virtual environment.

My basic requirements were :

1. need to run at least 6 resource demanding machines at the same time
2. need for virtual networking
3. silence in my lab
4. performance.

After some spec digging , I finally went for the following spec :

• Motherboard : Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R (link)
• Memory : Crosair 12GB (6x2GB) DDR3 1333 (link)
• CPU : Intel i7 920 (link)
• CPU Cooler : Thremaltake V1-AX CPU Cooler (link)
• HD : 4x WD Caviar Blue 500GB 7200RPM 16MB WD5000AAKS (link)
• RAID Controller : Adaptec 2405S (link)
• Display : Gigabyte HD 4350 512MB GDDR2 DX10.1 HDTV DVI HDMI PCI-E (link)
• Case : Antec - Nine Hundred Two (link)
• PSU : Thermaltake ToughPower W0103 600W PFC (link)
• Additional NIC : Intel PRO/1000 GT Desktop Adapter (link)

Although the Motherboard of my choice includes 3 (!) built in RAID controllers for different raid approaches , i had to introduce a more robust RAID controller that will support my demand for performance ( RAID 10 ) , will offload the CPU cycles to a dedicated processor , and will also be supported by VMWare ESXi , which is not trivial. same reason goes for the additional NIC – the Intel PRO/1000 MT is there in order for the ESXi HSC to have all drivers and hardware in my box officially supported.

Some design decisions :

• first , i wanted to make sure that the network card is officially supported , because as of now , VMWare only supports specific certified hardware ( an up-to date list of supported hardware can always be found here ) but the problematic ones are always the network controller and the disk controller (which halt the install if the install process doesn't like them). that's why i went with an Intel one, which at the time can be purchased in eBay for around 25-30$.
• for the disks , i chose 4 x Caviar Blue 500GB disks, and wanted to use them as a RAID 10 array , so all and all i will get 1TB of extremely fast storage, and i chose the Caviar Blue, because unlike the Caviar Green which throttles down to save energy , i need performance – and the Caviar Blue maintains a constant 7200RPM rate.
• the network card consumed my one and only PCI slot on the Motherboard , so although i was already considering a PCI Express RAID Controller , this became an essential part. at first i thought i could try to use one of the onboard RAID controllers , but VMWare rejected them, which at the end was ok – since by introducing the Ataptec card , all of the CPU cycles that are required to maintain the RAID are offloaded to a dedicated processor on the card. choosing the adaptec was fairly easy , since i wanted 4 disks in RAID 10 and PCI Express , and then i came across this article from Overclock3d.net which was enough to convince me im taking the right approach.
• for power supply i went as i always do with a Thermaltake Toughpower PSU , which i calculated based on their online PSU calculator , and multiplied by 1.6 as I always do when scaling a PSU.
• for RAM , just wanted a Triple Channel memory, and as much of it as i can get for a descent price, same as for display – i just had to have a display adapter in , so this was a cheap one with DVI+VGA+HDMI which made sense to have for future screens if i ever need one on this system.
• for the chasis , i wanted a box that will be cool , good air flow and fanning , and will be easy to build a heavy duty system into. my only complain will be that in order to mount drives , i had to take out the drive bay out ( the bold holders are hidden ) which took some time, but other than that , its an impressive beast. a good review of the box could be found here.

The ESXi latest version at time of install is the 4.0U1 which has more than a handful of features.

I am a happy chap today.

not one of my standard posts … but hey , its my blog :)

Barry.

Labels: architecture, desi, design, english, vmware

Posted by barry on Thursday, March 04, 2010 at 2:36 PM | Link