can someone point me to a computing newsgroup that will have knowledgeable people on in on teh subject of ESXI & VM's ?

[SH]

it is D-I-Y (of the computing kind!) after all!

I want to install ESXI on a single bare metal PC. This bare metal PC has just one ethernet socket.

I would then set up several VMs on it, one being OMV, another being Pi Hole, another being Wireguard and another being Ubiquiti Wi Fi Network controller

Now all these VMs need distinct IP addresses on it of the type

192.168.0.xxx to 192.168.0.zzz.

Now how can this be done when the bare metal PC has just one ethernet socket?

Can one allocate several different IP addresses to teh same physical ethernet MAC address?

A related questino is that I have a PCIe card that allows you to hang 8 SATA drives off it. How does one allocate which SATA drives to which VM's?

And presumably I must allocate one drive for storing the VM VHDs onto?

[John Rumm]

Might be worth going straight to the horse's mouth:

IP addresses are not physical addresses (like a MAC address), so you can have multiple ones assigned to one physical interface. Each VM would recognise its own IP and respond accordingly. The ARP tables in other nodes on the LAN would route all the IPs to the same physical address.

Yup.

You can allocate multiple IPs to one physical interface in most OSs

(note I am not a VMWare expert), but normally you can specify which hardware resources are allocated to a VM. It might be more common to use the drives to provide pooled storage that can then be used to hold virtual HDs for the VMs.

Not necessarily the whole drive... and VHDs don't all need to be on the same physical (or logical) disk .

[RobH]

u.c.homebuilt

[Steve Walker]

ESXI uses the physical port's allocated IP address for you to access it for management. Each VM is allocated a virtual network card and its own address.

I have actually added extra physical ports (currently unused), as I intend to use the server as a proxy and filter for the network's access to the internet, via a Nethserver VM (which is currently acting as fileserver, email server and media server and is also set up as a Domain Controller).

The drives can be allocated (individually or in groups) to Datastores. Space on the Datastores can be allocated to the VMs (whether on separate ones or grouped together).

Each VM is stored in and allocated disk space in the Datastore.

You can use Thick or Thin provisioning - Thick provides the allocated physical space, while Thin only provides what is needed ... allowing you to allocate more total space to your VMs than you actually have and add extra physical disk space as it begins to fill.

Alternatively, if the CPU is capable of it, individual items of hardware can be allocated to specific VMs - but that is more for video cards, sound cards, USB drives, etc.

My setup uses a hardware raid card rather than allocating individual drives, so ESXI takes a tiny partition on a "single" disk (currently two

6GB drives as a Raid 1 array, and there is a second Datastore on a pair of 2GB disks, but later I will probably add another four drives to the 6GB pair, in Raid 6), with the rest of the drive allocated as a Datastore.

The first VM loaded (Nethserver) is allocated most of the space, which it makes available to other VMs and over the network to PCs, satellite boxes, etc. by means of NFS shares and Samba shares.

However, I am no expert at this and arrived at this by reading and trial and error.

[Andy Burns]

Piece of piss, each VM can have one (or more) virtual NICs linked to the phycsical NIC of the ESX host, via a virtual switch.

Yes.

You *can* use Raw Drive Mapping to do that, but it isn't the usual way, if the PCI card allows creating a RAID array, I would do that, then format the array as a VMFS and allocate a smallish space to each VM, that way you can epand the virtual disks as and when required, or install more VMs, so you can have more VMs than SATA disks.

ESX itself dosn't need a whole disk, just a few paritions, which it will handle, the VMFS with the VMDKs (not VHDs) can go on another partition not necessary to be a separate disk, but consider RAID as above if it's an option.

Basically everything you're wanting is bread and butter, providing all your hardware has drivers for ESX.

[SH]

I see.....

I do happen to have 4 off 8 port Adaptec RAID controllers, IIRC, they are 2 off 6805 and 2 off 5805s

They are end of life but hopefully drivers are still available.

As I understand it, ESXI prefers SAS to SATA and these RAID cards can support both SAS and SATA drives... So hopefully 8 SATA drives on the card set up as RAID 6 will be presented as SAS storage?

That brings me nicely to another point..... how easy is it to back up VM's or the VHDKs so that they can be rebuilt on new hardware should the host bare metal die?

(I really do not fancy having to reinstall ESXI, rebuild the individual VMs and also re do all teh config settings on each VM.)

The machine in question is a quad core 3.2 GHz Intel with 16GB ram with two PCIe slots and one onboard gigabit ethernet and onboard HDMI video.

[Andy Burns]

vmware can be a bit ruthless in killing-off not very old hardware.

Certainly I've always used ESX with pSCSI or SAS, but that's in environments where warranty and support life win over cost.

Not likely I'd say.

typically in a commercial environment backups would be done via the SAN, with snapshots and replication, plus separate backup software e.g. Veeam, Data Protection Manager etc dunno if they have a freebie version?

For home use, when VMs are shutdown you can copy the .vmdk and .vmx files somewhere else (winscp perhaps?)

You can very easily move the underlying files from one host to another, or copy them e.g. before upgrades, or for testing.

Depending on how much RAM the VMs will want, I'd double, or quadruple that, video will be unused other than as a VGA console.

[Andy Burns]

There used to be a free VMware offering for backup, i think it was killed off a few version ago, but freebies exist

[Steve Walker]

Yes they can. However, Googling can provide some help. For instance, I soon found how to get hold of a driver for my unsupported NIC and patch ESXI, before installation, to use it.

The Adaptec 6805 claims to be supported by ESXI 6, but not 7. However the OP probably doesn't need 7.

For home use, I have used SATA (for the low price) and had no problems at all.

Isn't each array is presented to ESXI as a single disk, the RAID card's processor handling communications in and out of the card and ESXI has no idea at all what that array is actually made up of?

[Andy Burns]

Yep, I've done that trick to extract an earlier LightsOut driver from a old ESX installer and squirt it into a new ESX installer, to avoid purple screens of death.

yes it'll be "a RAID disk" not a SAS disk or SATA disk