November 8, 201312 yr Like the title says. I'm interested to find out what is an acceptable power draw for an esxi box. I'm running an i7-950 on a gigabyte MB (can't remember the model off the top of my head), areca 24 port card passed through to unraid, a cheap zotac graphics card and an additional intel nic. 12gb ram, 14 fans (12x120mm and 2x80mm). I am running 2 VMs, unraid and wse2012. And when it's just sat there not doing anything it is drawing around 120w. The windows vm only has 1x250gb and 2x2tb drives, the unraid has 8x3Tb, 2x2Tb and one 4tb reds. Just want to compare what every one else's is drawing.
November 8, 201312 yr Mine draw right around the same and I have 4 VM's running in total right now. Why do you have 14 fans?... I run my server from a Norco 4220 with the 120mm fan wall plate. I have a total of 5 fans in my case... works just fine for all the cooling I need.
November 8, 201312 yr Author It's a big case. 6x 5in3 caddies, 6 exhaust fans on the back, 2 on the radiator on the top panel. They aren't all needed yet but I've got them all in place for when all the bays are full.
November 9, 201312 yr Im pulling 380 Watts on average. HP Prolient 380 G5 2x Quad core Xeon 3.0GHz 32GB Ram 1x 300GB 15K SAS (esxi boot and iso storage) 6x 146GB 15k SAS ( 3x Raid 1 for VM's) 1x 200GB SSD SAS (Caching and Page) using the 2 onboard NIC's plus a duel Intel gigabit PCI-E x2 Card I have 4 VM's running 1 untangle 2 Exchange 1 Domain controller all runiing 24/7 Untangle: 2 cores 4GB ram 80GB Thin Provisioned Exchange (both): 2 Cores 8GB Ram 120GB Thin Provisioned DC: 1 Core 3GB Ram 60GB Thin Provisioned
November 9, 201312 yr Like the title says. I'm interested to find out what is an acceptable power draw for an esxi box. I'm running an i7-950 on a gigabyte MB (can't remember the model off the top of my head), areca 24 port card passed through to unraid, a cheap zotac graphics card and an additional intel nic. 12gb ram, 14 fans (12x120mm and 2x80mm). I am running 2 VMs, unraid and wse2012. And when it's just sat there not doing anything it is drawing around 120w. The windows vm only has 1x250gb and 2x2tb drives, the unraid has 8x3Tb, 2x2Tb and one 4tb reds. Just want to compare what every one else's is drawing. I am running 130 Watt on a moderately active system. I did took care choosing components that are relatively low in consumption.
November 13, 201312 yr Do you think it is possible to get an esxi to run at ~50w? your hard drives alone would draw more than that. Unless you have very few
November 13, 201312 yr With a 24-port controller, you're not likely to get below about 50-60 watts of idle (all drives spun down) power consumption. With all low-power drives, that would put you in the 150w range with all 24 drives spun up. I don't think you can do much better than that. This wasn't an ESXi system -- but the power draw should be very much the same, so it's interesting reading that's still relevant to your question: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=27460.0
November 19, 201312 yr My rig (see VM setup below) draws under 50w at idle and about 150w when I'm gaming on the windows VM. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
November 20, 201312 yr My rig (see VM setup below) draws under 50w at idle and about 150w when I'm gaming on the windows VM. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk how do you game in a VM? (videowise I mean) do you hook up your monitor directly to the esxi machine?
November 20, 201312 yr My rig (see VM setup below) draws under 50w at idle and about 150w when I'm gaming on the windows VM. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk how do you game in a VM? (videowise I mean) do you hook up your monitor directly to the esxi machine? Yes, the fact that I've passed through my GPU directly means that the windows VM gets full access. I just hook up an hdmi cable and off I go as per usual. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk
November 20, 201312 yr My rig (see VM setup below) draws under 5 I0w at idle and about 150w when I'm gaming on the windows VM. Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk how do you game in a VM? (videowise I mean) do you hook up your monitor directly to the esxi machine? Yes, the fact that I've passed through my GPU directly means that the windows VM gets full access. I just hook up an hdmi cable and off I go as per usual. Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk ah OK. I don't hook up to my esxi box. I know you can pass through the GPU but I've just never used my desk box outright. Good idea!
November 20, 201312 yr Author So it is possible to get a very power efficient esxi box. Interesting. With the 24 port card and some serious tweaking I have managed to get down to 78w idle. I still think I can get it lower but for now that will do. I like the idea of the esxi gaming rig. I think I might have a go at something similar. I am thinking 4x HTPC VMs, one to each room of the house. Providing I can find either 4 pciex8 hdmi cards or pcie16 cards that will run suitably at x8.
November 20, 201312 yr So it is possible to get a very power efficient esxi box. Interesting. With the 24 port card and some serious tweaking I have managed to get down to 78w idle. I still think I can get it lower but for now that will do. I like the idea of the esxi gaming rig. I think I might have a go at something similar. I am thinking 4x HTPC VMs, one to each room of the house. Providing I can find either 4 pciex8 hdmi cards or pcie16 cards that will run suitably at x8. your biggest challenge will surely be finding a motherboard with 4x PCIe slots...
November 20, 201312 yr So it is possible to get a very power efficient esxi box. Interesting. With the 24 port card and some serious tweaking I have managed to get down to 78w idle. I still think I can get it lower but for now that will do. I like the idea of the esxi gaming rig. I think I might have a go at something similar. I am thinking 4x HTPC VMs, one to each room of the house. Providing I can find either 4 pciex8 hdmi cards or pcie16 cards that will run suitably at x8. your biggest challenge will surely be finding a motherboard with 4x PCIe slots... There are boards out there with that many, but whether or not they are sufficient for ESXi is another matter. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007627%20600239779&IsNodeId=1&name=4
November 21, 201312 yr So it is possible to get a very power efficient esxi box. Interesting. With the 24 port card and some serious tweaking I have managed to get down to 78w idle. I still think I can get it lower but for now that will do. I like the idea of the esxi gaming rig. I think I might have a go at something similar. I am thinking 4x HTPC VMs, one to each room of the house. Providing I can find either 4 pciex8 hdmi cards or pcie16 cards that will run suitably at x8. This is similar to what I am doing, and I actually followed IronicBadger's guide to get it all running. 2 Win7 VM's with AMD cards passed through for Plex Media Center 1 Ubuntu running Plex Home Theater I plan to drop a card in to my PCIe x16 slot and create a gaming VM Motherboard has 3x PCIe slots. My home theater VM's don't need any quick or fancy cards, just enough to do bitstreaming audio. HD 6450's in use now, and running fine. Just wish we were not limited to AMD cards, as I like Nvidia. Also wish there were a way to pass through integrated video chips, on the newer Intel chipsets, these are actually useful as media center video cards.
November 21, 201312 yr So it is possible to get a very power efficient esxi box. Interesting. With the 24 port card and some serious tweaking I have managed to get down to 78w idle. I still think I can get it lower but for now that will do. I like the idea of the esxi gaming rig. I think I might have a go at something similar. I am thinking 4x HTPC VMs, one to each room of the house. Providing I can find either 4 pciex8 hdmi cards or pcie16 cards that will run suitably at x8. This is similar to what I am doing, and I actually followed IronicBadger's guide to get it all running. 2 Win7 VM's with AMD cards passed through for Plex Media Center 1 Ubuntu running Plex Home Theater I plan to drop a card in to my PCIe x16 slot and create a gaming VM Motherboard has 3x PCIe slots. My home theater VM's don't need any quick or fancy cards, just enough to do bitstreaming audio. HD 6450's in use now, and running fine. Just wish we were not limited to AMD cards, as I like Nvidia. Also wish there were a way to pass through integrated video chips, on the newer Intel chipsets, these are actually useful as media center video cards. More good news. You don't need to pass through the CPU graphics. Just set in the BIOS that it is the preferred video output and if you use a Linux OS not xenserver os then you can install xbmc directly there and voila. Not wasted. Glad my.guides helped you! Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk
November 25, 201312 yr So it is possible to get a very power efficient esxi box. Interesting. With the 24 port card and some serious tweaking I have managed to get down to 78w idle. I still think I can get it lower but for now that will do. I like the idea of the esxi gaming rig. I think I might have a go at something similar. I am thinking 4x HTPC VMs, one to each room of the house. Providing I can find either 4 pciex8 hdmi cards or pcie16 cards that will run suitably at x8. your biggest challenge will surely be finding a motherboard with 4x PCIe slots... There are boards out there with that many, but whether or not they are sufficient for ESXi is another matter. http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=100007627%20600239779&IsNodeId=1&name=4 This is the one I'm planning to do this with; http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4658#ov Summary specs are; AMD 990FX Chipset, x4 DDR3, x6 PCI-E , x1 PCI, x8 SATA 6GB/s, x2 eSATA, x1 Gigabit LAN, x4 USB 3.0, x14 USB 2.0, Realtek HD 7.1 Audio, SLI & Xfire Support Combined with an 8-core CPU, I figure I can run 3x HTPCs, each with a decent video card in one of the 6x PCI-E slots, with an 8x SATA card in another and my TV tuner in another. That would leave one PCI-e slot and a PCI slot spare. This board also segments the SATA ports onto different controllers allowing me pass 6x into the unRAID VM and keep 2x for system drives on dom0. (I'd therefore have 8+6 data ports available to unRAID) (to keep on topic, my main motivation here is to reduce power consumption across 4x current machines) Now I just need to gather the funds to do this. Peter
May 9, 201412 yr Yes, the fact that I've passed through my GPU directly means that the windows VM gets full access. I just hook up an hdmi cable and off I go as per usual. Have you considered using something like ultraVNC + VirtualGL to access that virtualized gaming rig remotely?
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