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Supermicro SBB as VMware HA in a box?
Anyone running small VMware cluster on a Supermicro SBB ?
www.supermicro.co.uk/products/nfo/sbb.cfm
Any reason why not to? The CPUs are only Xeon 5600 series rather than E5 but that's no biggie since as a one-box-wonder it would only have 12 disks so 2000 IOPS tops (planned for 1000). There's no option for boot disks but that's an advantage since it keeps the costs down and we can use USB sticks with ESXi on them.
The backplane is a single point of failure of course but I suspect it's passive as far as the data paths goes and only has active failure prone parts to light the LEDs etc. as is the case of many redundant controller SAN boxes.
Can't assign 123 points since it looks like it would be as easy as 123 so giving 135 instead (just miss out the even numbers in the setup guide).
www.supermicro.co.uk/products/nfo/sbb.cfm
Any reason why not to? The CPUs are only Xeon 5600 series rather than E5 but that's no biggie since as a one-box-wonder it would only have 12 disks so 2000 IOPS tops (planned for 1000). There's no option for boot disks but that's an advantage since it keeps the costs down and we can use USB sticks with ESXi on them.
The backplane is a single point of failure of course but I suspect it's passive as far as the data paths goes and only has active failure prone parts to light the LEDs etc. as is the case of many redundant controller SAN boxes.
Can't assign 123 points since it looks like it would be as easy as 123 so giving 135 instead (just miss out the even numbers in the setup guide).
IanTh
a couple of points you wont have a lot or cores and more memory you don't need storage to be local if you have say iscsi storage you can do storage by a vm iscsi solution like falconstor or a virtual linux build although you will need a fast network
ASKER
12 cores and 96GB per controller seems a reasonable amount. I don't see there being a problem using vMotion or HA beetween the two internal nodes.
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I guess it's not worth trying as it isn't supported under VMware even though it ought to work. It has two internal servers so HA would not be a problem any more than it's a problem on blades in an enclosure.
I have put v5 on some very old hardware and was surprised it had more hardware support too like v4 didn't recognise say the sata controller v5 did
I learnt clustering in vmware the same I used virtual esx servers but I did have to upgrade my memory as I had not enough as for cores v5 does do more in less in terms of cores its around 20% better
also look in the whitebox hcl instead of vmware's official hcl as it could simply be down to unsupported hardware that can be changed like sata controller add a raid controller that is in the hcl
I learnt clustering in vmware the same I used virtual esx servers but I did have to upgrade my memory as I had not enough as for cores v5 does do more in less in terms of cores its around 20% better
also look in the whitebox hcl instead of vmware's official hcl as it could simply be down to unsupported hardware that can be changed like sata controller add a raid controller that is in the hcl
ASKER
It's not for learning Ian, neither does it need virtualised hosts since it has two computer boards in it but I found http://supermicro.biz/support/faqs/faq.cfm?faq=11137 which says it isn't supported under VMware.
see
http://ultimatewhitebox.com/systems/38
its an older version for 3.5 you can get v5 free to try i would say try it I installed v5 on a atom cpu ! it did install it wasn't useful due to lack of memory I suspect
http://ultimatewhitebox.com/systems/38
its an older version for 3.5 you can get v5 free to try i would say try it I installed v5 on a atom cpu ! it did install it wasn't useful due to lack of memory I suspect