ESXi 6.0 on low end hardware (part two)

By | January 2, 2016

So, in part one I went over the hardware and the install. But you ask, how does it all work, can I do real work on such a setup? I guess my answer to that is that this is a lab, but I also have some stuff here doing useful work. I have all my local network monitoring stuff running as VM, I currently have running PRTG and Observium plus some others.  I also downloaded a bunch of OVA VM from these guys https://www.turnkeylinux.org with the intention of being able to quickly run up certain apps without going through the install process. I did at one time run my web site from home but it got bit flakey with the ADSL service we have here (only 1Mbit out) but am tempted to bring that back here again now.

So, this is whats running at the moment

vcenter

View from Vsphere 6.0 client connected to Vcenter. So I have mix of Windows and Linux guests running. You will notice quite a few TurnKey boxes running. These are brilliant and based on Debian 8 and are tiny out of the box and allow setting root password, MySQL password, app admin password etc on first boot. I have a whole bunch of these downloaded to run up and discover.

The most useful so far was their Observium, which pretty much just works. https://www.turnkeylinux.org/observium it was great to use this again after a long break and have it setup so easy. This gives some great information running against the ESXi hosts with SNMP turned on (no memory stats however, thats a ESXi problem not an Observium one)

host-cpu-observium

As you can see, CPU usage is there but they are not flat-lining in any way. It mostly depends if I am doing anything on the Windows 8 and 10 workloads. I have the three of them open and installing updates etc so they are not idle.

vmw1-stats-observium

Stats for a single host. Observium again, does a great job of telling you just what you need to know and nothing more. Am thinking to run this up again at work 🙂 and all of the above is coming ONLY from SNMP and nowhere else, so it’s really low overheard.

So for example I spent the last couple of days running up a Turnkey Nginx and WordPress (and others) and getting WordPress to play nice behind Nginx and set up some basic security like blocking /wp-admin, I just used the Turnkey VM’s for both of those. Mostly that was pretty easy but just the blocking part took a while (another article there). Am wanting to take a look at Elgg and Mediawiki also as possibles for a private social networking site I want to setup.

All in all I am pretty happy, Vcenter is still a slug and I had to use a dedicated host for it (see part one) but I got to learn a bit in the process. Guess I will be staying with VMware for a while now seeing how I have actually paid for it. I have to admit performance is pretty damn good and the Windows and Linux guest tools are second to none.

So whats does Vcenter 6.0 do to an Intel Celeron 847 you may ask ? http://ark.intel.com/products/56056/Intel-Celeron-Processor-847-2M-Cache-1_10-GHz   It survives 🙂 This is a dual core 1.1Ghz processor, here is 24 hours of stats from Observium

vcenter-celeron-stats

it works is the main thing and I can use that box for other stuff also. Memory use sits at the advertised 8Gb.

This should keep me busy for a while LOL

turnkey-vm

OTRS up next

TBC

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