Inside Dark Networks

VMWare has recently released its ESX 3.5 server. While the ‘free’ server version has some benefits, the overhead to run it is way too high, so ESX is still the best way to virtualize.

After reviewing the forums, there still exist a number of problems when pursuing the home ESX server option. The main issue being version 3.X has very limited SATA support. While some support for EIDE exists, these cannot be used for hosting the actual VM images (which is the whole point of virtualization in the first place).

After a great amount of research, it turns out the LSI Logic MegaRAID 150-4, which supports SATA, uses the same VMWare driver  (MegaRAID2) as it’s SCSI predecessor. It is also available cheaply on eBay (approx $120). The card supports up to 4 SATA drives. Another version of this card, the 150-6 supports 6 SATA drives.

With the difficult part out of the way, the next part was to find a motherboard that would support more than the typical 4GB of RAM and support a powerful processor, all on a budget.

Surprisingly, rather than build one of my own, the Gateway GT5630 came to the rescue. The machine is available from Frys for a mere $699. It comes with a quad-core Intel Q6600 processor and motherboard that supports 8GB of RAM. Fry’s again came to the rescue with 8GB for $150.

So, once I got my PC surgery was minimal. I simply opened the box, and took out the paltry amount of included RAM, replacing it with my 4×2GB sticks for 8GB. I then inserted my full length card in my normal length PCI slot. Make sure you upgrade your BIOS from the LSI web site as otherwise it will be quite unreliable in ‘degraded PCI mode’. Then connect the RAID card to your SATA drive and you are ready to boot.

Then I booted up the machine. Happily, it automatically detected the RAID card and automatically loaded the megaraid2 driver.

However, another problem came up. Despite booting off the ESX CD, the ESX installation decided that it could not read the included IDE CD-drive. My work around was as follows:

Luckily the GT5630 comes with an Intel NIC card for which ESX has drivers. So I ejected the installation CD, and stuck it into another machine. I then downloaded a free FTP server program and configured it to make the installation CD available on the second machine via FTP.
       I went back to my GT5630. I told it to install via FTP. It received a DHCP address and I pointed it to the FTP server with the installation CD. It carried on installing flawlessly.

So despite a few minor hiccups, I now have ESX server running on a pretty powerful (quad core with 8GB RAM) server for less than $1000. Most likely, I will add a few hard drives to it soon.

Hardware Costs:

Gateway GT5630 = $699
8GB RAM            = $150
RAID Card          = $120
Total Cost           = $969