ESXi 5 on MicroServer?

[Joe_Miner]

Anyone running ESXi on their Proliant N40L MicroServer?

 

HP Office Bundles for ESXi

[jmwills]

Can you put enough RAM in the server to make it viable? I am still having problems trying to get ESXi to see more than 2TB in a datastore. THE BIOS see the RAID 5 array as does an install of Server 2008, but not ESXi.

[Joe_Miner]

I was wondering if there were any on this Forum who were/had done it. You can get 8GB in which is viable for a home test system. There's a ton of hits if you google MicroServer and ESXi including this enterprising "HP ProLiant MicroServer N40L 'ESXi 5 Testbed' Bundle" -- I'm surprised Newegg hasn't done this yet.

[agent-v]

Hey guys, first post here. Signed up just to answer your question.

 

I have an N40L with ESXI 5 installed on it. It's currently hosting SBS 2008 and 2 Windows XP pro VMs. Naturally I bumped up the ram to 8 gigs. Everything installed out of the box.. I had zero issues. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it ran these 3 VMs reasonably well. I've had this running for 2 months now. My next project is to install a dual-port card in it and see if I can also get it to run Untangle as a VM.

 

ESXI 5 should be able to address more than 2TB for your datastores. It will not however allow you to create VM's larger than 2TB. You will have to add virtual disks to your VM if you need more than 2TB of space for your VM. I don't have a datastore greater than 2TB on my microserver so I don't know if this is just a microserver issue you're seeing. I was able to create a 4TB on a Proliant 350 G6.

[jmwills]

Funny this post should come back up. I bought the N40L on sale for $229 this week and have enough RAM to kick it up to 16gigs if needed. It is slated to test ESXi 5.0 with storage, for the most part, coming from an iSCSI storage server with 10TB of of HDD space.

 

The current HyperV clients would be migrated over to ESXi clients thru the convetor tool, which I have run successfully before. So, by Wednesday night I should be in full geek mode.

 

To answer the above question, ESXi will not be able to see anything larger than 2TB locally unless it is presented as iSCSI.

[ikon]

Interesting; so iSCSI can be larger than 2TB.... whadya know.

[jmwills]

My WHS is currently a Hyper V client with 6TB storage coming from an iSCSI target. WHS sees the drive as one physical internal drive, which it really is not.

[Joe_Miner]

Hey guys, first post here. Signed up just to answer your question.

 

I have an N40L with ESXI 5 installed on it. It's currently hosting SBS 2008 and 2 Windows XP pro VMs. Naturally I bumped up the ram to 8 gigs. Everything installed out of the box.. I had zero issues. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it ran these 3 VMs reasonably well. I've had this running for 2 months now. My next project is to install a dual-port card in it and see if I can also get it to run Untangle as a VM.

 

ESXI 5 should be able to address more than 2TB for your datastores. It will not however allow you to create VM's larger than 2TB. You will have to add virtual disks to your VM if you need more than 2TB of space for your VM. I don't have a datastore greater than 2TB on my microserver so I don't know if this is just a microserver issue you're seeing. I was able to create a 4TB on a Proliant 350 G6.

 

Fantastic! Let us know what you learn and welcome to the board!!

[jazzerjay]

Love this running ESXi, no issues whatsoever. Motherboard won't take more than 8GB of RAM if memory serves. Still, 8GB is fine and dandy.

[KrisseZ]

Umm... what do you mean by only 2 Tb locally? You can attach a raid controller to enable a larger datastorage than 2 Tb, or you can have multiple 2 Tb disks and make them as separate datastores, so that only 2 Tb datastore locally is a bit confusing.