New Server - SageTV+unRAID under ESXi 4.1

[stanger89]

Figured I should probably wrap up my part of this saga. I abandoned the idea of running in a VM, not due to unRAID or Sage, which both appeared happy in my limited testing, but due to the R5000 utterly failing to work when virtualized. Both USB and PCI passthrough (of the USB controller) failed miserably.

So what I settled on is running Sage on the 780G/Athlon X2 BE-2400 (~70W-80W idle IIRC), and for my unRAID box I bought a Supermicro X7SPA-HF, which is an Atom D510 with IMPI (web/network management).

[m4tth3wv]

I was inspired by this thread and joined in.

I've had success with the following:

- ESXi 4.1+
- SageTV in Win 7 VM

OS in VMDK

Recordings to disk via RDM (Did not want to deal with recordings being dependent upon network/remote server)

HDPVR and USBUIRT via USB Passthrough (Not PCI passthrough)

UNRAD in a VM

3 disks presented via RDM; had issue with UNRAID detecting SCSI disks, workaround herehttp://lime-technology.com/forum/ind...topic=7914.135

- Playon/Internet filesharing/general purpose server in VMDK

Will add a general purpose VM for some other stuff.

Only negatives are the workaround for UNRAID and can't seem to get AnyDVD to use a CD/DVD drive, via external USB or internal.

[davephan]

Originally Posted by stanger89

So what I settled on is running Sage on the 780G/Athlon X2 BE-2400 (~70W-80W idle IIRC), and for my unRAID box I bought a Supermicro X7SPA-HF, which is an Atom D510 with IMPI (web/network management).

I'm thinking of rebuilding my unRAID server to free up the I-7 950 quad core build for a Linux SageTV server. I checked the Supermicro X7SPA-HF, it's main limitation is the single PCI-E X4 slot and DDR2 667 memory. The Supermicro X7SPA-HF has 6 SATA connections, so a PCI-E 16 drive SATA adapter would be needed to expand the unRAID server to 20 data drives plus 1 parity drive and 1 cache drive. Maybe the DDR2 667 memory is fast enough, but it seems slow by today's standards.

Dave

[stanger89]

Yeah, the "conventional wisdom" is that you run the X7SPA/SPE with the Supermicro 8-port AOC card for a total of 14 drives, which no, isn't 20, but it's still pretty good considering.

As far as RAM, the hard drives are the limiting factor, you really don't need super-fast RAM.

[antplugger]

Hopefully I wont jinx myself but I have been running successfully with ESXi 4.1. Using a Intel DQ45CB Adaptec 3805 with 8TB and 8GB memory.

VM 1: NAS - OpenSuse 11.3 with Samba for DVD, Music, Pictures etc
VM 2: SageTV V7 - XP, HD-PVR (s-video) and HD Homerun + 1TB of Recording disk, USB-UIRT
VM 3: Utility - XP, Itunes, Squeeze server, Air Video etc etc
VM 4: HomeSeer - XP (USB Z-wave + usb-uisrt + USB Modem)
Vm 5: Mail - Qmail Linux server

I have 2 x HD200 and 3 x HD300

As I said, all running perfectly - That said I am backing up critical stuff twice a week......

Cheers

[Shield]

First of all, Merry Christmas to all. I am just starting out exploring esxi 4.1, and of course I'm getting the "NIC not compatible" errors.

I have a local Microcenter with a HCL approved NIC - my question is this though - the motherboard I'm using has dual onboard NIC's - once I setup esxi with those disabled, can I reboot and re-enable them and dedicate them to the VM's? Or will any instance of non-compatible NIC's cause esxi to crash?

Thanks!
Shawn

[Fuzzy]

If your board support PCI passthrough, you MAY be able to pass those NICs through to the guest OS's, but not with the network virtualization system built into ESXi.

[elefante]

U can if it works, however it is much easier to purchase a few cheap gige intel nics (under $30) from you fav online store. that way u can use the paravert os driver and vmware tools. use vmxnet3.

[Shield]

Well today has been a nightmare. I threw a spare SATA drive in my main rig and installed esxi 4.1 - to my horror, not only was that drive reformatted and partitioned (which I expected) but EVERY disk that esxi could see became repartitioned and reformatted. Luckily I have/use GETBACK for NTFS and I'm restoring everything.
I was not happy with it doing this - it should have read "All disks will become formatted" not just "the disk you're installing esxi will become formatted".

I think I will just stick with 2008R2 and Hyper-V and run Sage on the host. My box is a i7-950 / Asus x58 1366 mobo with 24gb of ram. I only use a TwinMCE dual NTSC tuner (to record Spongebob) and a HDHomerun. If I scale back the showanalyzer it should be fine, right?

[stanger89]

Weird, when I installed it, it only formatted the disk (in my case USB flash drive) I told it to install on.

[ChaOConnor]

I pulled the trigger on a nice external 4-disk RAID / JBOD encloser, plus 4 WD Green 2TB drives. This will allow me to pull everything of my WHS box and put it somewhere while I setup ESXi.

Question to those who have installed ESXi, unRaid & SageTV... where did you start? I've never used ESXi, I've read this thread, the HCL, some VMWare forums, etc., but I was wondering if anyone had good sources of info on setting up a ESXi machine?

I'm still confused on how to use the hard drives in the ESXi box. For instance, if I have:
3 x 1TB drives
2 x 2TB drives
in my WHS box now, all in the storage pool, what would be the best way to configure an ESXi box to have: unRaid & SageTV (with ComSkip, PlayOn, etc.) I don't need anymore VMs than that, but could probably put an additional one in if it made sense for maintainance, etc.

Just looking for any advice from those experienced in these matters.

Thank you in advance!

- Cha

[m4tth3wv]

A few suggestions.

ESXi
Start by installing ESXi and ensuring your basic hardware is recognized, NIC(s), SATA ports, JBOD enclosure. If ESXi doesn't like something you'll either get a PSOD (ESXi version of BSOD, but purple) or something isn't recognized at all.

ESXi has 2 different install options, install to disk or install on a USB thumbdrive. Google for instructions for ESXi on a USB thumbdrive. The latter is an easy way to determine if ESXi will work on your hardware. More work to get it on USB but saves you from installing to a local disk.

SageTV
Next, setup a VM and ensure your SageTV devices work, capture devices, IR blasters and what not.

I use a USB based capture device and ir blaster, since ESXi supports USB passthrough, this was easy for me. For PCI(e) based devices, ESXi supports passthrough for "some" devices and requires a motherboard that supports this feature.

If all good, I'd setup SageTV and ensure that that works. I dedicate a physical drive to my SageTV VM for recordings via the ESXi feature RDM (Raw Device Mappings). This basically dedicates a disk at the hardware level to the VM. Via RDM, the OS in the VM thinks of the disk as physically attached so that if you were to put the drive in another machine it would be recognized similarly.

Otherwise, the disk will be added to ESXi as a datastore and you must then create a virtual disk, VMDK. Not a bad thing, but i wanted the flexibility to move back to a physical machine at will. Due to lack of SATA ports, I installed the OS for SageTV to a VMDK. But, you could do the same.

Unraid
This one gave me the most issues. Unraid isn't currently supported in a VM. Meaning they don't have driver support for the virtualized hardware presented by ESXi. With the help of the community, a lone contributor has provided builds that supplies the necessary driver support.

Following the same logic above by using RDM, I only wanted to use RDM for Unraid so that if I had a VM failure of lack of support or performance, I could simply take the drives out and put them into a physical box. I'm not sure if other people use VMDKs but considering I'm using 2x1.5TB and 1x2TB drives , I didn't want to worry about having to rebackup my data.

With that said, read this forum posting and it'll give install instructions and how to get the driver support for ESXi. Good idea to read this before you go down the ESXi route to ensure you're up for it.

UnRAID on VMWare ESXi with Raw Device Mapping

I haven't bought the Unraid license due to their lack of support for ESXi. I'm fine with 3TB of storage for awhile.

Final thoughts
To answer your question about how to use your drives, my preference was to use RDM. This bypasses adding them to ESXi as datastores.

Other options to consider though, buy a hardware RAID card that is supported by ESXi. There are a few out there (probably the Dell PERCs) and I may go down this route. However, some RAID cards are supported by ESXi AND Unraid. This would give you the advantage of dedicating the RAID card to Unraid (with PCI passthru support) and possibly using Unraid builds without the modified builds linked in the forum posted above. I like a lot of plan Bs

If you want to play with more features of VMware, you could actually run their free tool called VMware vCenter Converter. This tool can create a VM of a running physical or virtual system and export it to ESXi or even to a VMDK outside of ESXi. Install the tool on SageTV or even on another machine. I did this to test ESXi and didn't want to go through the hassle of reinstalling a new VM to test.

Comskip runs on my SageTV VM. With a single capture device and 2vCPUs dedicated to SageTV, it runs well.

PlayOn was running in another a Win7 VM with 2 vCPUs ( server has an older quad core Q6600 ) but couldn't keep up. I have enough CPU cycles however I think that IO maybe is issue. Sage/Playon/Unraid and another linux VM all share a single drive to run their OS VMDKs.

I'm out of SATA ports so I may come back and fix this later with a RAID card or an SSD.

Overall, I'm pleased with running so many VMs on the same hardware that was previously dedicated to Sage. My next steps will be to buy an i7 in hopes for doing video transcoding and purchasing a RAID card to expand storage and performance.

My only disappointment is I can't get AnyDVD to rip DVDs from a VM. DVD drives and ESXi don't interact the same way as disks. Not a biggie.

[elefante]

ESX 4.1 can perform perfectly, and the two most likely architectures are:

1. External storage block or file, and ESXi server for compute (sage, etc)
2. Storage server as a VM within an ESXi server and other VM's for compute.

Option one is by far the easiest and most scalable. In my case I run an iscsi server, however I am experienced, so for those who want to succeed without a lot of aggravation a dedicated NAS box (netgear, Synology, etc) that serves up the storage to you apps is the best. These boxes use very little wattage, have great software, and have pooling options if you add drives.

If you buy disk without a hardware RAID card, it is best not to run it within a VM, but in a dedicated server. ESX supports a number of hardware RAID cards natively, and you can run RAID and other VM's in that box (I run vCenter in that box, with the storage server).

You can present storage to ESX is two forms : block and file. Block can be RDM (raw), FC (fibre channel), or iSCSI (IP). The file is NFS and for the home user (and a lot of my customers) is the way to go. With NFS you can easily move VM's and files around and you can pool storage how you wish. With block (like iSCSI) its a little more difficult and this runs in a VMFS file system, which is again more complex than NFS which is just NFS which of course runs on some file system (ext3, ext4, etc)

As you have already purchased storage, I'm assuming you want to do some sort of software RAID. TBH modern processors can do the job no problem. Openfiler and Naslite are good. I like Naslite-m2..it's paid ($35) but it only has a 12 MB footprint. I could never get openfiler to partition and format the way I really wanted, although others have seen success.

Naslite can also present SMB so you can use that for all of you data drives for windows (where I keep all my media). I also have run opensuse since I can compile iscsi target to my liking and firewall rules are easy enough.

I'm waiting for the Synology 1010+ to go down in price w/ the new ones out, and then just serve up NFS..

[ChaOConnor]

Thank you for the comments, my external storage & drives should arrive today. I can start mirgrating data to it over the week and maybe next week/weekend, put ESXi on the server.

More to follow, but thank you both again!

- Cha

[heffe2001]

Just to follow up on my system, I attempted running one of my 2250's under Win7 & WinXP on ESXi, and couldn't configure the VM to have more than 1gb of ram without having errors on startup. Configured as a 1gb VM, it boots but that's not near enough RAM for my Sage install.

I think I'm just going to combine my unraid box and my ipcop box on the hardware I bought, re-install my Sage box with Win7, and leave it at that.

[jayman]

Originally Posted by m4tth3wv

My only disappointment is I can't get AnyDVD to rip DVDs from a VM. DVD drives and ESXi don't interact the same way as disks. Not a biggie.

Check out http://forum.slysoft.com/showthread.php?p=295803

It looks like this guy got his DVD-ROM (host device) to be recognized, but his external USB DVD had problems.....

[farscapesg1]

Originally Posted by m4tth3wv

My only disappointment is I can't get AnyDVD to rip DVDs from a VM. DVD drives and ESXi don't interact the same way as disks. Not a biggie.

Hmmm, I don't have a copy of AnyDVD, but I have used the trial version of DVDFab Passkey an both a Windows 7 and WHS VM, and when I connect the host DVD drive to the VM it recognizes it and reads/rips the information without any problems.

[ChaOConnor]

So here is my current status.

• eSATA External Encloser - I have a Rosewill RSV-S4-X with 4 x 2TB Western Digital EARS Green Drives in them.
• Parity - I am using an SAMSUNG Spinpoint F4 HD204UI 2TB 5400 RPM (their Green Drive) as the Parity Drive for the Rosewill Box.
• Cache - I have a Western Digital 1TB Black drive as my cache drive for unraid.

unRaid works.

Now I need to virtualize this unRaid setup.

ESXi runs on my server. I have backed up my data, able to install ESXi, I'm presented with a blank ESXi install, I haven't made any VMs yet. Ultimately I'm going to have:

• unRaid - see above
• W7 - run WMC on it with access to SiliconDust HDPrime when it comes out
• WHS? - I currently run SageTV on WHS. I could re-use my license and keep WHS to one drive (so that DE doesn't get funky). I also like the automated backups of WHS for my client PCs. On the fence about this decision, but I'll probably test it out either way.

I have read the forum and instructions here about unRaid in ESXi, but I'm still fuzzy on the details. Asked a few questions, haven't gotten any responses. Wanted to see if anyone here had any advice. Mainly I want to know how I can "virtualize" my current unRaid setup, vs. starting from scratch like the instructions seem to have you do.

Either way, this is a fun project and I appreciate all the advice I've gotten so far! Take care!

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by ChaOConnor

I have read the forum and instructions here about unRaid in ESXi, but I'm still fuzzy on the details. Asked a few questions, haven't gotten any responses. Wanted to see if anyone here had any advice. Mainly I want to know how I can "virtualize" my current unRaid setup, vs. starting from scratch like the instructions seem to have you do.

Can't help you any but I will be starting a similar path (I hope!) in 1-3 weeks depending on time and when my equipment arrives. Posted just so that you know someone is interested in your progress.

[rlvogel322]

Originally Posted by BobPhoenix

Can't help you any but I will be starting a similar path (I hope!) in 1-3 weeks depending on time and when my equipment arrives. Posted just so that you know someone is interested in your progress.

Same here. Looking at your progress with great interest. I would love to get to an ESXi box with WHS, V7 (maybe XP since I have a license) and UnRaid all on one box. I may skip the WHS part but it sure does work nice for PC backups.