Tag: VMWare

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All disks are not equal, especially cheap consumer disks without temperature sensors (a.k.a HP DL380 G7 fan speeds running like a 747 on take off)

I’ve recently been enjoying the freedom of a homelab, creating VMs on VMware ESXi and installing all-the-things. I’ve had my HP Proliant DL380 G7 for a couple of weeks now and already accumulated a number of VMs for investigating a collection of things:

Prior to my DL380 arriving, I was pondering what type of disks to put in, and in particular whether I used go with cheap consumer laptop hard disks, more expensive (e.g. WD Red NAS disks), or named-brand HP disks. I went with a pair of HGST 500GB disks to start with, and ran into an issue with the cooling fans spinning up like a 747 taking off.  Googling for “dl380 disk fans” turns up many related posts, and it turns out that some non-HP drives in Proliant servers may not report their internal temperature correctly, resulting in the server thinking the drives are overheating, and cranking up the fans to compensate.

Here’s a couple of screenshots (from the iLO – Integrated Lights Out) showing the fans ramping up to near unbearable noise levels over about 5 minutes:

  • iLO reporting the drives overheating:

  • Only after a couple of mins, but still running faster than probably should be at idle:

  • Starting to ramp up:
  • Getting unbearable now:

If I’d spent some more time reading aound I would have found this excellent article detailing this issue, and more specifically drives known to work in the DL380 and drives known to have this issue. Turns out, most of the WD disks do work, so I replaced the HGST drives with 2 WD Black 750GB drives. Now the server at idle runs with the fans between 10-13% and is actually no louder than a regular desktop.

Back to creating some more VMs 🙂

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Cloning an existing VM on VMware ESXi using command line vmkfstools

Apparently vCenter Server provides the ability to clone VMs via the Client, but not if you’re just using ESXi and managing your host directly with the web client. It is possible however to clone a VM’s disk using the vmkfstools commanline utility as described in this post.

Here’s a summary of the steps:

Enable SSH from the ESXi web console: Host / Manage / Services

In my case I wanted to create a copy of an existing CentOS7 VM. SSH into your ESXi host, then:

vmkfstools -i CentOS7-1/CentOS7-1_0.vmdk CentOS7-2/CentOS7-2.vmdk -d thin

Next, create a new VM as normal, but on the Customize Settings dialog, press the X on the right to delete the disk created by the new VM wizard:

Next, press ‘Add new disk’, select ‘Existing hard disk’, then point to the copy of the VM disk that you created with the vmkfstools command:

Credit to this post for the tip to configure using an existing disk.

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Virtualization, homelabs, eBay rack servers and a 2008 Mac Pro

I’m fascinated with installing different OSes to see what they’re about. At one point on VirtualBox I had about 20 different VMs with all sorts of guests from OS/2 to many different Linux distros. Somewhere on my internet travels I ran into the Reddit Homelab group, a community of sysadmins who run virtualization on older, used rack servers (and other hardware), to experiment with configuration of VMWare ESXi, and other virtualization software like Proxmox VE.

Window shopping on eBay, you can pick up various used Dell or HP rack servers with dual Xeons and several swappable harddrive bays for around $100 to $200 depending on the specs. I was getting close to picking up one of these, until I wondered if you can run ESXi on a Mac Pro. Turns out you can and it is even supported hardware on VMWare’s HCL list. Trouble is my eBay 2008 Mac Pro is not on the supported list for current ESXi versions, so I’m not sure if a current version would install and work ok, or whether I’d have to go back a few versions.

My MacPro currently has 20GB RAM, and I’ve got 3 empty drive bays. Watching a few YouTube videos such as the ones below, I feel a weekend project coming on 🙂

 

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