Introduction:
I've decided to beging studying for the VCP 5 exam since it is what we are using at work. After alot of research I found many of the information available on building a whitebox Vsphere 5 was limited. Considering vsphere 5 has only been out for a few months it is understandable. I wanted to create a post to help others looking to build a lab with desktop hardware that may not be on VMWare's HCL. I took many of the ideas from Julian Regel's blog:
Living on the Cloud: Building a vLab Part 1: The Design
Goal:
To build a virtualization server to handel my needs for VCP and other certifications. To minimize the footprint by using one box still be able to run nested VM's so I could work with vmotion, vcenter and shared storage.
Hardware Requirements:
Processor:
There were some gotcha's when piecing my build together. I learned you want a processor which has VT-D.
I/O MMU virtualization (AMD-Vi and VT-d)Main article: IOMMU
An input/output memory management unit (IOMMU) enables guest virtual machines to directly use peripheral devices, such as Ethernet, accelerated graphics cards, and hard-drive controllers, through DMA and interrupt remapping. This is sometimes called PCI passthrough.[30] Both AMD and Intel have released specifications:
AMD's I/O Virtualization Technology, "AMD-Vi", originally called "IOMMU".[31]
Intel's "Virtualization Technology for Directed I/O" (VT-d).[32]
This elimitnate the K-series of Intel processors. The i5 2500 and i7 2600 processors have this feature and have been confirmed to work with certain motherboards.
Motherboard:
For VT-D to work, you must find a motherboard that not only has this feature but allows you to enable it. Several boards have been reported to have it greyed out, but turned on later with a bios update. After reading about Tinkertry's vZilla project
“vZilla†Z68/Core i7/LSI 9265-8i – built for virtualization, storage, and speed | Tinkertry and the different motherboard's he tested with I opted for a ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3. To me it had the best bang for the buck. The onboard NIC works with vSphere. I did not see the need to spend another 60 dollars for an extra nic and more sata\usb ports.
Ram:
I picked up 2x4GB sticks of Blue Kingston ram for $30AR. I plan on getting another 8GB in the next few weeks.
Storage
There are several options available. You can buy a NAS device or build one. Some of the options are: OpenFiler, FreeNAS, and Starwind. You can build a dedicated NAS on spare pc hardware or you can use a vm appliance. They allow you to use software raid and support Iscsi. I have not setup my storage pool at this time. I already have several 500gb, 1TB and 2TB drives I am able to use.
USB Drive: I am running Vsphere off a 8GB thumb drive I had already. A smaller drive will also work as ESXi is only using 900mb.
Case:
I have a 20u rack for my cisco lab and decided to get a 4u rackmount case.
I had Vsphere up and running in less than an hour. I do not have a DVD ROM so I created a bootable usb drive to install from. I found the instructions here:
How to make a bootable VMware vSphere 5 USB installation media | satheesh.net
Cost:
It cost me about $560.00. Not a bad price in my book.
ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3 Motherboard : 132.00
Intel i7 2600 processor: 270.00
16 GB Ram: 60.00
Rosewill RD400-2-DB 400W PS 25.00
Rosewill RSV-L4000 Black Metal 75.00
