I am getting ready to put together an ESXi system and wondering how to run my other VM's.  I have to trains of thought and don't know witch way to go.  One way is to install ESXi on a USB thumb drive and have a dedicated drive with separate partitions for each vm install.  The other option is to install ESXi and the virtual machines on the drive.

 

How are VM's installed on the drive?  Is a file created that the VM OS resides in or is the VM OS installed directly on the drive?

 

I pan on running unRAID along with at least one other VM most likely two or more.  How this VM are stored on the drive will help me decide how to proceed.  I have two options for drives also I have a 2.5" 500GB drive and a 3.5" 1.5TB drive.  I would prefer to use the 2.5" drive because it would be easier to find a place to mount inside my already packed server.

you install ESXi onto a thumbdrive and boot off it.

You assign it one (or many) datastore drives.

these drives store all the VM config and the Virtual hard drive files.

 

you cannot use the USB thumbdrive as a datastore (and you wouldn't want too!)

I am getting ready to put together an ESXi system and wondering how to run my other VM's.  I have to trains of thought and don't know witch way to go.  One way is to install ESXi on a USB thumb drive and have a dedicated drive with separate partitions for each vm install.  The other option is to install ESXi and the virtual machines on the drive.

 

How are VM's installed on the drive?  Is a file created that the VM OS resides in or is the VM OS installed directly on the drive?

 

I pan on running unRAID along with at least one other VM most likely two or more.  How this VM are stored on the drive will help me decide how to proceed.  I have two options for drives also I have a 2.5" 500GB drive and a 3.5" 1.5TB drive.  I would prefer to use the 2.5" drive because it would be easier to find a place to mount inside my already packed server.

 

What other systems are you planning on running?

 

I am getting ready to put together an ESXi system and wondering how to run my other VM's.  I have to trains of thought and don't know witch way to go.  One way is to install ESXi on a USB thumb drive and have a dedicated drive with separate partitions for each vm install.  The other option is to install ESXi and the virtual machines on the drive.

 

How are VM's installed on the drive?  Is a file created that the VM OS resides in or is the VM OS installed directly on the drive?

 

I pan on running unRAID along with at least one other VM most likely two or more.  How this VM are stored on the drive will help me decide how to proceed.  I have two options for drives also I have a 2.5" 500GB drive and a 3.5" 1.5TB drive.  I would prefer to use the 2.5" drive because it would be easier to find a place to mount inside my already packed server.

 

What other systems are you planning on running?

 

I am planning to run Mac OS X at for sure.  Maybe these WHS original (because I have an unused copy), Windows 8 to try out, windows XP if I can get my hands on a cheap copy, and Linux.

 

Plans got put on hold until I can figure out why when I am preclearing more than one drive I get I/O errors.  If I only preclear one drive at a time I have no problems.  I have swapped out memory because I ran Mem test and got 3 errors in the first minute, the new memory (from 4 to 32GB) passed a 24 Hr run 2 passes no errors.  Swapped from on board SATA to a SUPERMICRO AOC-SASLP-MV8 but I think I did that before I tried pre-clearing multiple drives, I have a spare AOC-SASLP-MV8 card so I'm going to try that next.  I'm going to make a new post for this when I get home and have the syslog handy.  But the syslog is 183 MB so I have to figure out what might be important and only post that.

But the syslog is 183 MB so I have to figure out what might be important and only post that.

Use an archival program and ZIP it up and post the archive.  Logs compress very will so it should fit.  Unless you meant you already did that and the archive is 183MB.

I swapped my SAS cards and so far so good.  I'm going to see if the 4 drives that I have preclearing 3 times make it though with no I/O errors.  These drive have already been precleared and are known good drives, I am re-pre-clearing the drives to test the SAS cards.

The 4 drives that I had preclearing did give me I/O errors.  Checked the syslog and found and error accessing a file on the flash drive that I did not see before.  I swapped to the spare flash drive that had 4.7 on it and had no problems.  Either I had my flash drive go bad or it is a problem with 5.0-RC8.  I ran a check disk on my windows machine and the flash drive had some bad sectors that were fixed.  My next step is to downgrade to 4.7 on the original flash drive and see if I still have problems.  This system doesn't have any files on it so I won't lose anything.  If I sill have problems I will have to contact Lime-tech and see if I can get a replacement drive, I ordered a 2 pack pre configured flash drive.