Kevin Rohrbaugh

First a disclaimer: This post is mainly geek porn for myself. Since most of the content below has been captured elsewhere, it’s not really adding anything new to the corpus of ESXi knowledge on the Internet. Oh well.

Why Am I Doing This?

Throughout my career, I’ve always worked at organizations large enough that systems administration and IT operations were handled by a different group from the development organization. I have always been on the development side of the fence, which means I run into basic sysadmin work from time to time but my first-hand knowledge is limited. In an attempt to fix this (and satisfy my need to buy new hardware constantly), I decided to buy a beefy home server to run VMware ESXi on.

If you haven’t heard of ESXi, it is a free (as in beer) bare metal hypervisor, which basically means it runs virtual machines without the need for a traditional host OS. Essentially, I can setup multiple virtualized servers on one physical server and learn as much about systems administration as I’d like.

The Machine

Using the excellent unofficial hardware compatibility lists on Dave Mishchenko’s vm-help site, I spent a bunch of time sorting out whether I wanted to build a machine or buy a whitebox server. Eventually, a sale on Dell’s Small Business site led me to decide that the whitebox option was the way to go. I ordered a Dell PowerEdge T110 with the following configuration details and costs:

• Dell PowerEdge T110 - $1300
• Processor: X3440 (Lynnfield) Xeon, 2.53GHz, 8MB L3 Cache, Quad-Core with Hyper-Threading
• RAM: 16GB (4x4GB) 1333MHz, Dual Ranked UDIMM
• Network Adapter: On board
• RAID Controller: None
• Storage (HDD): 4x 1.5TB/7200RPM Seagate Barracuda OEM drives (6TB) - $330
• Storage (Flash): Patriot Xporter XT Boost 8GB Flash Drive - $25

Total cost ended up being just shy of $1655, including shipping. Note that I cheated a bit because I already had one 1.5TB Barracuda that I had picked up for this project at a recent Microcenter sale so its purchase price isn’t included. Through NewEgg, the fourth drive would add about $120 more for a grand total of $1775.

While $1800 is not exactly cheap, 16GB of RAM and 6TB of drive space is a bit excessive, so it’d be possible to build a more reasonable config for quite a bit less. The biggest downfall for this setup is the lack of RAID, so my 4x 1.5TB drives are four discrete drives within ESXi (JBOD). Not a huge deal to me, but not ideal, admittedly.

Putting It All Together

The process of putting all the pieces together was pretty mundane, with the only real delighter being the two internal USB ports on the T110’s motherboard. Since my plan was to install ESXi on the USB flash drive, this allowed me to avoid having it stick out the back of the machine permanently. Overall, the internal design of the T110 is nice. The rest was uneventful, so I won’t bore you with details; only pictures!

The Setup Process

I went into the ESXi setup process thinking it was going to be this big battle that would take me all weekend. It actually took about an hour, and was so straight-forward I was kind of disappointed. This is all I did:

• Downloaded and burned the ESXi 4.0 Update 1 Dell Customized ISO from VMware
• Enabled “Virtualization Technology” under “Processor Settings” in the T110’s BIOS to turn on Intel’s VT-x
• Changed boot order to flash drive first (the USB drive was recognized by BIOS without issue)
• Installed ESXi 4 U1 from the disc to the flash drive, which the installer saw as a drive without any changes

That’s really all there was to it. Based on VMware forum posts, this process was harder before Update 1 of ESXi 4, but it’s pleasantly uneventful now.

Creating Servers

Once ESXi booted up, I was able to configure TCP/IP and host name settings using the text-based menu system on the machine. I christened the new box kermit (all my PCs are named after Muppets) and then installed the VMware vSphere client on my main Windows 7 machine to finish configuration settings and start making virtual machines. I ran into some issues cloning my base Windows Server 2008 R2 VM, but due to the length of this post, I’ll leave the details for another day.

So far, I’ve got primary and secondary Active Directory controllers (affectionately named statler and waldorf), along with the accompanied DNS servers, running my home network name resolution. Unified logins and not having to mess with IP addresses or hosts files is pretty cool.

Was It Worth It?

With two servers performing networking duties and a third ready for configuration, I can easily say I’ve learned more about running servers in the past two weeks than I have in the last two years at work. I’ve had the need to dig into sysinternals a few times, learned quite a bit about Active Directory and was up until 3AM one night reading about DNS record types. I’m still not an expert, and probably never will be with such a small network to manage, but I’ve been having a ton of fun along the way. It’s been an effective learning tool for me so far, and I’m just getting started with what I want to do.

In fact, ESXi is one of the coolest things I’ve played with in quite a while, so my only regret is that I didn’t look into it sooner.