ESXi and OMV on HP Proliant G8 - Advice

Good morning guys,

I would like your opinion here. I have been using OMV for the last 2,5 years now and I am pretty happy with it. But the thing is I never get rid of the windows VM on PHP virtualbox and other couple of VMs that I need for my tests. As you know. PHP virtualbox on OMV is not actively maintained + I think the resources would be better managed by an ESXi which is natevely supported by my HP Microserver proliant G8 (The windows VM is slow if you compare a direct install on the SSD which I tried).

But here is the question, is this a good idea?

Currenty my set up is:

- One SSD 64GB for OMV (I also have a symbolic link to have a « shared folder » in OMV to use it for the windows VM on virtualbox. It’s much more quick than having it on the WD Red.
- One WD Red 3TB member of the mirror
- One WD Red 3TB member of the mirror
- One WD Green 2TB used by rsync for a weekly copy of important things.
- 6GB of RAM
- It’s the prloliang G1610T with intel xeon.

Would it be possible to install the ESXi OS and the VMs on the SSD and physically keep my WD hard drivers to be « ONLY » managed by OMV? Or do I need a storage for the VMs separated from the ESXi OS? In this case, can I use a microSD or a pendrive to run the ESXi OS?

Another idea would be to take all my WD hard drivers and make them the « storage » of the ESXi and then in OMV create virtually a « mirror » with two virtual hard drives. I kind of don’t really this option....it’s just a feeling but maybe it’s ok?

One additional motivation is I always wanted to test ESXi at home.

And last but not least, what about the migration?! All my data are in the current set-up.

What would you do guys? I am open to options.

Zitat von Nibb31

You just need to passthrough the drives to the OMV VM.

Thanks @Nibb31, but what about my other questions:

- Can I use a microSD or a pendrive to run the ESXi OS?
- Would it be possible to install the ESXi OS and the VMs on the SSD? (both)
- Another idea would be to take all my WD hard drivers and make them the « storage » of the ESXi and then in OMV create virtually a « mirror » with two virtual hard drives. I kind of don’t really this option....it’s just a feeling but maybe it’s ok?

- Opinion about the set up?

Thanks!

Zitat von tkaiser

Sure, just always test either SD card or pendrive with either F3 or H2testw first to check for counterfeit/broken devices (especially when you bought cheap). Performance of the device doesn't really matter since with ESXi it's more or less read-only anyway (that's different with OMV!)
ESXi on SD card or thumb drive, SSD as datastore for the VMs and if you want to play RAID-1 (for whatever reasons -- IMO just an insane waste of disks) with pass-thru mode you should be able to re-use an already existing array but of course you can also let ESXi export the disks and then let OMV use them as virtual devices. Availability (that's what RAID-1 is all about!) won't work with the latter mode since ESXi will stop the OMV VM once there happens something with the underlying disk device. RAID-1 even more useless than usual.

Ei @tkaiser !

Thanks a lot for your very interesting comment here!
Still shocked by the way on the “raid1 insane waste of disks comment”...lol. I did that in the past just to have something very transparent preventing data loss. If one disk fails, just need to buy another one, plug it and add it to the array, that’s all... but to be fair, I also do rsync weekly for the important data to a third disk.

May I ask then what would be your recommendation here? SSD as storage for the VMs and then all the disks as “shared storage for the ESXi” ?

What do you mean by « availability »? Does that mean that having the disks as shared storage data is available even if OMV VM is powered off?

Sorry if I am missing something...pretty newb on the ESXi stuff...

Zitat von tkaiser

You can't prevent data loss with RAID since it' not made for data protection but is only a try to keep data available (that's the 'availability' I was talking about) in case a disk fails hard: Home NAS build, FS info

Hi @tkaiser, after some reading, I followed you advise and just broke my raid into 2 separated disks with 2 different services (1 disk for the improtant Data, another disk for the Media, then having the third disk to backup the data disk).
I am going to try this morning to have an ESXi on my proliant G8 having the OMV VM installed on the SSD. Then have a passthough on my 2 physical HDD disks as I want them dedicated for OMV. By the way, you never responded to my question... is it better to have my HDDs shared for the vcenter and then just create virtualdisks for OMV?