ESXI Sagetv Datastore Hardrive?

[Hunter69]

I currently have a esxi server setup. I have intentions to virtualize my sagetv server. Currently I have 2 machines virtualized. Unraid and a Homeseer home automation server. The datastore these 2 virtual machines are running on is a 60 gig ssd. I have heard about ssd burnout using it as a datastore. I have also read that it is not a big deal if you are not writing a whole bunch to the OS. So unraid should be fine. I still need to research my homeseer server. Now I am looking at a setup like this for sagetv:

Win 7 64bit.
8 gigs of ram
4 virtual processors
vt-d pass through for my 2 Collossus
rdm the recording drive (thinking of a 1tb caviar black, what do you think)
I am looking to created a new datastore. I am looking for suggestions, 1tb caviar black, ssd (with the marvel chipset)??

Currently I record HD through my 2 collossus and a hdhomerun. I also do comship. I use extenders for watching tv. 2 hd200 and 1 hd300.

Thanks for any and all help.

In case you are wondering if my hardware is esxi compatible. I am running a supermicro mobo with a quad core xeon and 16 gigs of ram.

[BobPhoenix]

I currently have an SSD RDM'd for my SageTV ESXi VM's (Win7x64) boot drive. Even though Windows says Trim is enabled I don't trust that it is actually working. So I'm going to replace the 128GB SSDs boot devices for my SageTV VM's with my 300GB Raptors and RDM them. Gives me plenty of room for images and online downloads. I would rather RDM the boot drive so that I can move it around between my ESXi servers easier. I have a 40GB SSD as my datastore (37.? GB total capacity) 34GB free so not worried about it dieing anytime soon even though the ESXi logs write to it. But even if the 40GB datastore does die I can just pop in another drive create the datastore and setup the VM's again. I figure it will take about 15 or so minutes to setup the VMs and RDM the drives total. The longest part is finding the instructions on creating the RDM's with "vmkfstools". I use my WHSv1 VM to backup the individual boot drives of the other VMs and then backup the WHS backups with BDBB to an external drive. I also have Acronis to get me an image backup periodically as well to an external backup NAS.

[Hunter69]

So I bought a 250gig raptor and a 1tb drive for recording. Would you mind providing the link to rdm a boot drive in esxi?

Thanks for the input/help

[ChaOConnor]

Originally Posted by Hunter69

So I bought a 250gig raptor and a 1tb drive for recording. Would you mind providing the link to rdm a boot drive in esxi?

Thanks for the input/help

http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/SATA_RDMs.php

These are the instructions I used. Seems crazy, don't let it scare you. Just go through it step by step and you'll be fine.

Think about what you want to do, then decide if you want a virtual RDM or a physical RDM. I used physical for recordings.

Good luck!

[BobPhoenix]

And if you want to follow my method (technically Johnm's method on unRAID forum) you follow Tip#3 in this post on the unRAID forum's.

[harrijay]

I hppe you are not running esxi 5.1 because PCI passthrough is broken on it currently.

Esxi 5.1 pci passthrough broken

Jayson

[ChaOConnor]

Originally Posted by harrijay

I hppe you are not running esxi 5.1 because PCI passthrough is broken on it currently.

Esxi 5.1 pci passthrough broken

Jayson

Did not know that, thanks! Whew... Was going to upgrade to 5.1 when I got home, put that one on hold. ;-)

[Hunter69]

Originally Posted by harrijay

I hppe you are not running esxi 5.1 because PCI passthrough is broken on it currently.

Esxi 5.1 pci passthrough broken

Jayson

Thanks for the info.
I read the post and it seems to be PCI not PCIe. Specifically Passing through PCI devices that integrated on the mobo. Although the funny thing is, I have seen that pink screen but my sata controller is not supported by esxi. I had to do a hack to make it work with esxi.

[patja]

I run Sage as a VM on an esxi server. I run napp-it/OpenSolaris as one of the VMs which hosts an 8TB ZFS RAID-Z2 storage pool. All of my VMs run with their datastores sourced from that storage pool.

is there a real need or benefit of running a Sage server VM on an SSD or even a SATA drive via RDM? In my case I felt the addition of an SSD to the mix was better served as an L2ARC and log device to speed up the ZFS storage pool performance for everything running on the server.

[Fuzzy]

There are reasons to have the sage drive on some sort of fast random storage. Mainly for UI speed (fanart, database lookups, etc are all MUCH faster when sagetv is installed on either an SSD, or an aggressively cached harddrive). In fact, with the slight random access overhead involved in VM's to begin with, I'd give it all the help it could get. I'm personally fond of large cache than SSD for sage, but that is more a cost reason than anything. RAM can become more of a resource issue on a heavily utilized ESXi system, so SSD may be the better option in this case. Either way, Sage is always going to work out better RDM's than via the datastore.

[Skirge01]

Correct me if things have changed, but I seem to recall that TRIM was not yet supported in vSphere (ESXi).

[Fuzzy]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Correct me if things have changed, but I seem to recall that TRIM was not yet supported in vSphere (ESXi).

I don't think it is either - it's possible the only way to truly get trim support would be through hardware mapping the sata controller itself to a VM.

[BobPhoenix]

Originally Posted by Skirge01

Correct me if things have changed, but I seem to recall that TRIM was not yet supported in vSphere (ESXi).

It is not supported up through 5.0 (don't believe 5.1 has it either but don't have any experience however). I have my SSDs RDM'd as boot devices. The access speed is definitely there but even though Windows indicators show Trim is enabled I don't trust that it is actually working. I am working on putting the boot drives on my Raptor's instead of the SSD's because of that distrust. Or possibly setup a boot device as virtual HDD and OS drive on the SSD on a controller I might have better luck and what I was thinking about trying next. I have yet to get a VM to boot from a controller that has been passed through. I might be able to tweak the VM bios to get it but so far I haven't had time to try it yet. The default settings will not boot from a SASLP-MV8 for sure and I though I tried with my IBM M1015 as well but I could be wrong.