December 12, 201312 yr I currently have a 27TB unRAID mostly full. If I wanted to start using ESXi would I have to start completely over with fresh drives? Could my guests access the current 27TB? Thank you, needo
December 12, 201312 yr I currently have a 27TB unRAID mostly full. If I wanted to start using ESXi would I have to start completely over with fresh drives? Could my guests access the current 27TB? If you are sure your motherboard, CPU, SATA / SAS / RAID controllers work in ESXi... It's an easy process. If you aren't sure your hardware works in ESXi 5.1 or 5.5, post your specs and the ESXi Veterans will be able to tell you about any issues or "gotchas" way ahead of time. As far as your guests accessing the 27TB... If you mean by NFS, Samba, AFP, yes. If you meant to write directly to the drives, no.
December 12, 201312 yr Author This is what I am building... Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD5H CPU: Intel Core i7-4770K RAM: Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Case: Norco 4224 with 120mm Fan Bracket 2xIBM M1015 LSI SAS9220-8i Syba PCI Slot Mount Mobile Rack for 2.5" Drive 3xGELID Solutions 120mm Fan FN-FW12-15-B 2xGELID Solutions 80mm Fan FN-PX08-20 4xSFF-8087 To SFF8087 2xReverse Breakout Cables Thank you.
December 12, 201312 yr This is what I am building... Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z87X-UD5H CPU: Intel Core i7-4770K RAM: Crucial Ballistix Sport 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Case: Norco 4224 with 120mm Fan Bracket 2xIBM M1015 LSI SAS9220-8i Syba PCI Slot Mount Mobile Rack for 2.5" Drive 3xGELID Solutions 120mm Fan FN-FW12-15-B 2xGELID Solutions 80mm Fan FN-PX08-20 4xSFF-8087 To SFF8087 2xReverse Breakout Cables Thank you. I haven't looked up the rest of your stuff but right off I can tell you that your CPU is a no go for launch. The Intel Processors that end in K CANNOT do VT-D. That is required for you to be able to Passthrough. You also need a motherboard that supports VT-D and IOMMU (the one you listed might, I didn't look). Intel has A LOT of CPUs floating out there that do not support VT-D so you have to do your research. If you go AMD, even their cheapest ones have AMD-V (their version of VT-D). Even though some of the links below reference Xen... They are a good starting point. The last one is a list of all the Intel CPUs that have VT-D. VT-d Enabled Systems List of IOMMU-supporting hardware Supported Intel CPUs Regardless of what you see above in those links, I would lean on the ESXi Pros here and go with their recommendations.
December 12, 201312 yr If your hardware support it, as grumpy said, you will not have any trouble migrating the whole array (I did it myself changing ram, mb, cards, etc) . My advice would be to start unraid vm with a spare empty disk to make sure you don't hit any walls, once you're confident your cards, ports, drives, etc are recognized, power down, connect the drives and start the vm. You might have to use the 'trust my array procedure' so I'd recommend to run a parity check before migration to ensure your data and drives are good. Sent from my GT-I9305 using Tapatalk
December 12, 201312 yr From page 54 of the manual for your motherboard: Intel Virtualization Technology (Note) Enables or disables Intel® Virtualization Technology. Virtualization enhanced by Intel® Virtualization Technology will allow a platform to run multiple operating systems and applications in independent partitions. With virtualization, one computer system can function as multiple virtual systems. (Default: Enabled) VT-d (Note) Enables or disables Intel® Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O. (Default: Enabled) It appears your board and its bios has the necessary support. But I would still want further confirmation from someone who has actually used it with ESXi. And with what version of ESXi. ESXi support for the sata ports and nics may or may not be there. Worst case you have to add compatible pcie boards to get what you need. VMware support of desktop boards is very hit and miss.
December 12, 201312 yr Author I already have the offending CPU so it looks like I am out for the count for ESXi. I wish I thought about doing ESXi before ordering the CPU, but live and learn.
December 12, 201312 yr Or run unRAID bare metal and do other virtualization with esx like running VMs that complete other chores for you like SAB and torrents for downloading you favorite Linux distros.
December 12, 201312 yr Author Yeah, I still have a 14 day return on the CPU. I could go trade it in. I am pondering that. If I was to move over to ESXi would I keep my existing data in the unRAID VM with the pass through SATA controllers or would I conver them into datastores? What is the common/best practice?
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