Open Source Home VM Server help and advise

Thanks that's very useful. I'll enable this and do as sandys suggested and measure the power draw.

 

No love for Proxmox in here?

 

Can't say I'd heard of it myself.

I thought most of the other KVM type ones were slower also... not that I'd notice to be fair.

Another thing being, I might have a full licence available soon for ESX from work.

 

How is it at rendering heavy guis like gnome3 and and unity? I was looking at this a while back. Haven't installed it though.

 

You can link HDD's directly to VM's for those that don't know. You just have to create a VMDK / RDM pass through container using the console.
I used to do this all the time until I moved my NAS to dedicated hardware and stopped vitalising it.

Not tried it in 5/5.5 but I believe this still works:
http://fdo-workspace.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/vmware-esxi-41u1-raw-sata-hdd-pass.html

On the subject of proxmox, if you are using pfSense don't bother. pfSense doesn't virtualise properly in it and randomly drops the NICs.

Additionally if you are virtualising pfSense, don't connect both virtual NIC's to the same network, you'll cause an ARP flood. Guess how I found that out

 

oh that's handy thanks biosniper, I'll be sure not to do that!

For now with the one 3TB is it best to make a small partition for ESXi and each VM to be installed on and then use the rest as a share with NAS4free for files?

 

Put esxi on a USB key. Then you can leave the HDD for a small data store for isos, thin provision os installs and give the remainder to nas4free as a separate device.

Once you are set up and happy you can image your USB key in case it dies. Then buy a USB header so you can put it directly on the board inside the case... Keep it out of site.

The raw device mapping would be advantageous for nas4free I believe. But mostly as a San. (Connecting to one that is, maybe there is some control benefit to an os also but with my limited knowledge someone else is going to have to laymen it for me)

Google around and see if it makes sense to you. Here is from horses mouth:

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsphere-4-es...mapping/c_benefits_of_raw_device_mapping.html

Personally, as I have pass through available I find it way more advantageous to pass through a sata card to nas4free. This allows better control again as nas4free controls the HDDs independently of esxi. The disadvantage being if you want other VMS to use those disks you must pass back with shares(NFS, samba) or iscsi

Edit: did some more googling and tbh, unless you need to use rdm, either educationally or for reasons listed in the link above, I'd avoid it

Edit 2: 2tb limit is no longer an issue with esxi 5.5... So you don't need it to use your 3tb disk unless you have a disk larger than 62tb :-D

 

which version of windows are you running? win 8 pro has hyper-v but you do need hardware with specific requirements.
Windows 8 Pro or Enterprise 64 bit Operating System
64 bit processor with Second Level Address Translation
BIOS-level Hardware Virtualization support
At least 4GB system RAM

its not installed by default, but you can turn the feature on.

 

I don't think PegasusM is using windows is he/she?

 

Not using Windows, current idea is ESXi with VMs for pfsense, NAS4free and a lightweight linux for downloads.

 

Ok so an update on where I'm at.
Last night I put all the hardware together adding a 8800gts while I install as mobo has no graphics out. I installed ESXI 5.5 using a DVD drive (tried with USB but no luck).
I then measured an idle power usage of 140w, took out the 8800gts and plugged into the network and measured again and got around 80w, much better.
I installed vSphere on my windows PC and connected.

My next steps are to create the VMs and assign them memory. I'll then need to install pfsense first to get the networking going. I found a guide which should help but any tips?

 

Create multiple vm networks and bind each adapter to it's own network first

 

Do you mean each physical adapter? I've got 2 NICs, one(WAN) plugged into the router, the other(LAN) into a gigabit switch connected to other computers. So my understanding is I need to:

first create a vm for pfsense with 3 virtual NICs
- connect 1 to the WAN NIC via a virtual switch
- connect the next to the LAN NIC via a virtual switch
- connect the last to the other VMs via a virtual switch

Is that right?

 

Create the vmnetworks (virtual switches) first.
Then bind the nic's to those networks.

You only need 2 networks as you're going to put other vm's on the LAN anyway

 

Ok great will do thanks

 

I've hit a problem now. I set up the networks like this following a guide:

I then set up and installed the pfSense vm assigning each virtual NIC to the right network, it rebooted and was assigned ips:


Problem is with the WAN network cable attached I can't access pfsense web UI or access the internet from the LAN.

I unplugged the WAN cable and got onto the pfSense web ui and set it up with the wizard but that hasn't helped. Any ideas what I need to do?
thanks

Edit: Could this be an issue caused by connecting to the router? If so what do I need to change? Connection is like ISP>Modem>Router>WAN NIC on server>server>LAN NIC on server>LAN with switch and PCs

Screenshots of the setup in pfSense here

 

You want different subnets on the wan & lan side of the firewall, you also want to assign them statically

 

You don't see any problem with your WAN IP being 192.168.1.85 and your local LAN network being 192.168.1.x ? Assign your network to a different subnet as saspro said.

WAN side entirely depends on the provider, if provider provides a DHCP service only, then there is no statis IP to set. And what sense would it make for LAN to not use DHCP ?

 

Routers, switches etc should always be statically assigned.
You wouldn't want the IP address of your firewall or router changing for any reason

 

Oh you meant the router IP on the LAN side. Well, he has it static as i can see, em0 has a static IP of 192.168.1.1 assigned. The only problem i can see with that setup is the fact that that IP is in the same subnet as the WAN IP.

I was thinking you were advicing him to disable DHCP service for LAN network, which would make no sense. Of course router LAN IP address is fixed.