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Saturday 24 September 2011

Upgrade ESX 4.1 update 1 to ESXi 5

vSphere 5 is out! Manage to find some time this week to upgrade my ESX 4.1 update 1 environment to vSphere 5.  For those people out there using ESX(i) whitebox, below is my whitebox configuration that works with ESX(i) 4.1 and ESXi 5.

Item
Description
Qty
Cost
Total (SGD)
1
Gigabyte x58A-UD3R
1
$ 365
$ 365
2
Intel i7-960 3.2 GHz
1
$ 377
$ 377
3
Asus EAH5450 Silent 1 GB DDR3
1
$ 79
$ 79
4
Kingston 12800/1600 (3x4GB in a kit)
2
$ 219
$ 438
5
Seagate 1 TB 32MB 7200rpm
1
$ 82
$ 82
6
Seagate 1.5 TB 32MB 7200rpm
1
$ 105
$ 105
7
Andyson F650M 650W Modular 80+
1
$ 135
$ 135
8
Samsung S222 22x DvD+-RW
1
$ 22
$ 22
9
Intel Gigabit ET Dual Port Server Adapter E1G42ET
2
$ 225
$ 450
10
Normal Casing
1
$ 72
$ 72

Total (in Singapore Dollars)


$2,125


Total is Singapore Dollars $2,125 or USD $1,634.  With this price, I have got a single machine with 4 CPU core running at 3.2 GHz, 24GB Memory, 3.5TB Storage Space and 4 Gigabit Ethernet Ports. 


My 24 GB memory works fine.

My Seagate 1TB and 1.5TB HDD works fine with VMFS5.


Below is the screen capture of the Intel Gigabit ET Dual Port Server Adapter and the onboard Realtek 8168 Gigabit Adapter.  Do note that the onboard Realtek 8168 does not support Jambo frame (MTU 9000).  Running at the default MTU 1500 should be fine with default vSwitch.   If you change your vSwitch to support MTU 9000, you can't add Realtek to your vSwitch.


More to come on the ESXi 5.0 installation.
Below is the screen capture of the Intel i7-960 Processors and Gigabyte Motherboard from my vCenter 5.0.

2 comments:

  1. Any problems with the Intel E1G42ET NIC?

    Apparently other people have had problems with that NIC. Just want to get your opinion before I buy one.

    /P

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yes, my Intel E1G42ET NIC is doing fine in ESX4.0, ESXi 4.1 and ESXi 5.0. I have got 14 of these cards, all doing fine with great speed as well. In fact, my E1G42ET can even boot from iSCSI. Which means you don't even need a HDD in your ESXi. But boot from iSCSI is just for testing, do not try it on actual environment as there are other considerations.

    Cheers!
    Thomas Low

    ReplyDelete