VMware vSphere 6 On HP ProLant DL360 G7 Questions

[ArcticWolf_11]

Hello, I am currently thinking about installing vSphere 6 on DL360 G7 and I have a few questions

1. Is there a difference from vSphere and ESXI?

2. Do I install vSphere, connect to it using the client, and then use it like VMware workstation?

3. Can I run a firewall using PFSense, a windows 10 and linux VM?

4. How do I update the bios to the Reconmended VMware ESXI version? It says online rom

5. Will there be any preformance differences compared to say by dual booting into a linux distro and running one by VM?

6. Is there a way to get SATA 6 on the SAS backplane with Sata SSDs?

Thanks!

[parnassus]

Well...of all your six questions - IMHO - only the fourth one can be considered *really* HPE ProLiant Server related...to manage HPE ProLiant SystemROM and other components updates is generally handy - making it simple - to use the HPE SPP (Service Pack for ProLiant) approach or acting through the VMware environment (performing updates within the VMware hypervisor).

Questions n°1, 2, 3 and 5 are *really* general...and googling a little bit can help you a lot (the answer of Question n°1 can be easy found directly on the VMware web site if not directly on Wikipedia, as example).

Question n°6 is somewhat unclear: are you asking if SATA drives can be installed on a SAS Backplane or what else (mixing SSD Sata and Rotational SATA or SSD SAS and Rotational SAS shouldn't be an issue, generally)?

[ArcticWolf_11]

Thanks, sorry about that really new to servers, I got 2 DL360 G7 servers with 2x X5650s in them for $130, sold one and kept the other. So I was thinking of ways to use it, on the manual I read that the SAS backplane was Sata 6 using SAS but if you plug in a sata hard drive or SSD, it would be Sata 3. I plugged 2 SSDs in raid 0 and got 600-700 Mb/s read and write. Also is it bad to be using SSDs? I read that the drives can fall out of an array, how does that happen? Thanks!

[parnassus]

Too general questions: SSD aren't bad or good, it's their usage that can be bad or good.

SATA 6 disks should be recognized by the RAID/HBA Controller as SATA 6 is the RAID/HBA Controller is SATA 6 capable...so it's important to understand which RAID/HBA Controller are you using and which disks are you installing on it.

Just a note, using two (or more) SSDs or Rotational disks to form a RAID 0 (Stripe) Volume configuration, from the point of view of data/volume security/integrity/accessibility in case of disk failures, is not a good idea (a single disk failure will bring your whole Volume down...so bye bye data on it...don't use it nor for OS booting partition neither for partitions where you are planning to store important data...simply don't use it), other RAID levels are far more secure (RAID1 - as example - for OS boot partition, RAID5 or RAID6 - better - for the rest...but much depends on the workload you're planning to have on that Server).

I don't know you requirements (what are you planning to do with that Server...in order to understand what could be a good storage subsystem deployment), nor your exact Hardware bill of materials...but any restriction and any performance consideration on that storage sub-system, in your case, is directly related to the RAID/HBA controller - HP Smart Array model? - your Server is currently equipped with.

Good luck!

[ArcticWolf_11]

Thank you. The controller I have is the Smart Array P410i with 1gb of cache, it has 32 gb of ram and dual X5650 CPUs. I got 2 of them for $130 at a local auction and I sold the other one for $140 so I pretty much made $10 and got a server out of the deal :D. I was planning on using vSphere to host a windows 10 vm and PFsense. PFsense will be a firewall for my network and windows 10 will be for hosting game servers off of. With this workload, should I just go with cheap 146gb SAS drives off of ebay then? Thanks