New ESXi setup - is my motherboard compatible

[konawolv]

hi guys,

im going to be upgrade my personal PC shortly freeing up my personal build to become my ESXI playground.

My specs would be:

AMD FX8350
Asrock Fatal1ty 990FX Professional
16 GB 1600 ram
3 x 1tb WD Reds Raid 5
(pending raid controller.. these things are insane to research)
Radeon 7950 (passthrough)

The VM I plan on running would be:

1) gaming VM for steam in home streaming for the wife/guests. will pass through my gpu here along with some usb ports in case someone wants to dock

2) plex server

3) File server

4) Domain controller (practice my GPO skills)

5) test vms

It is my understanding that I will need AMDvi / IOMMU support to run ESXi. From my research, the Asrock Fatal1ty 990fx's support those features.

Does anyone have experience with ESXi and an AMD setup that is similar to mine? any tips would be appreciated before I drop $1200 getting this set up.

 

[ss202sl]

Just a thought. Instead of getting 2 reds plus a raid controller. How about a SSD(256 or 512) for the actual VM's (os drives)with a data drive(d) on a 1Tb drive. This may be cheaper and may be faster.

 

[konawolv]

I forgot to mention that I was planning on putting esxi on 120 gb ssd and have my gaming vm installed on there as well. I have an extra 120 as well. I could raid 0 them for 240 gb in space and put my vms on there.

I also wanted a little bit of fault tolerance as I currently don't have a backup solution built, and probably wont for a while. I will consider this though. I could prob just get x2 tb drives and use one to back up the other which would give me fault tolerance without needing a raid controller

 

[GhislainG]

Have you checked if that motherboard is on the whitelist? The NIC probably won't be supported. There are several RAID controllers on the official list; the challenge is making sure a controller is compatible with your desktop motherboard. Unless you buy a caching RAID controller, you'll probably get better performance if you dedicate a hard disk to a couple VMs at most.

I haven't found a single post that indicates your motherboard will work; using an Intel platform usually is easier because of the larger motherboard selection.

 

[konawolv]

http://www.overclock.net/t/1338063/vt-d-compatible-motherboards

this thread is a compiled list of all known motherboards that support vt-d/vt-x/IOMMU which is the requirement for virtualization and hardware passthrough. On VMware's compatibility page, they don't list desktop grade AMD systems, but do for intel. So, I have kind of threw VMware's page out of the window. I also found a user on hardforum who has their esxi setup with an fx 8350, gigabyte 990fx mobo, and a radeon 7950 as a passthrough gpu (his name is koolaidkitten I think). so, I know it can be done.

EDIT:

here shows that 990fx chip sets support IOMMU for VMware: http://thehomeserverblog.com/esxi-5-0-whitebox-hardware/esxi-5-0-whitebox-hardware-amd-motherboards/

Here shows that my NIC being unsupported has a viable fix to inject the correct driver into the ESXi install: http://www.mandsconsulting.com/installing-esxi-with-bcm57781-driver-fix

 

[GhislainG]

If you know that it will work, then go ahead with it. What NIC will you get? Will you get a real hardware RAID controller?

 

[konawolv]

my nic wont change, I would just be pushing the correct driver to esxi. but as for the raid controller, I don't know. do I even need raid 5? should I just do 2 disks one for storage and one to backup the storage?

 

[GhislainG]

I'm using Hyper-V (my server also is ESXi compatible, including the NICs), but I decided to use separate hard disks. That way a disk intensive VM doesn't slowdown VMs on other hard disks. If a VM really needs high performance storage, then a SSD resolves the issue.

 

[konawolv]

What is your solution for redundancy? I suppose a solution would be to purchase a NAS later down the line. This could be good, I wont have to go out of my way to buy WD reds or a raid controller

 

[GhislainG]

I perform backups to external disks on a regular basis.

 

[konawolv]

Thanks for the help guys. im not going to bother with raid in this set up. At least not right now. I will go with a single 2TB drive for now (storage) and use my x2 ssd's to store vms on.

I confirmed that my bios has all of the virtualization settings last night when I was poking around in the eufi.