Intel Xeon X3430 support in ESXi?

[sirozha]

Hello,

Has anyone tried to install VMWare ESXi 4 on the Intel Xeon X34xx platform (specifically Intel Xeon X3430)?

Dell has a great price on the PowerEdge T310 server that is based on the Intel Xeon X34xx platform (X3430, X3440, X3450, X3460, and X3470). The X3430 is especially a good deal. It has 8 MB of cache, supports RAID, up to 32 GB of RAM, has a hot-swappable HD option and LCD diagnostics.

I need to get a server to run ESXi for my Cisco CCIE lab, but I am not sure if the Xeon X34xx platform is supported. If it is not supported, my next choice would be a Dell PowerEdge T410 with Intel Xeon E5504, 2.4 GHz, 4 MB of cache, 800 MHz Max Mem. So, is Intel Xeon E5504 supported and has anyone run ESXi on this platform? Is it powerful enough to run 4-5 VoIP servers (CUCM, UC, CUCCX, Presence, etc.) concurrently?

Thanks!

[AntonVZhbankov]

It's not supported yet, but I'm sure there will be no issues.

---

MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[sirozha]

So, what components may be incompatible with the X3430 platform? I don't want to purchase the server to find out that something does not work right. Dell does not ESXi as a choice for this system, and neither does the VMWare compatibility page mention the Intel Xeon X3430 platform.

[AntonVZhbankov]

I'm 100% sure there will be no problems with Xeon 3430, but platform contains also NICs, RAID controller etc.

---

MCSA, MCTS, VCP, VMware vExpert '2009

http://blog.vadmin.ru

[DSTAVERT]

The processor may work just fine and as Anton says it is just a matter of time before hardware platforms based on the 34xx have been tested. The processor and motherboard are probably the least problematic. The other components are the problems. The hard drive controller and the network adapters cause most issues with installing and running ESXi. The 410T you mentioned should be able to support your needs but you will need to make sure you have a supported raid controller if you want RAID protection. The embedded controller does not support RAID as far as ESXi is concerned although you should be able to install to the SATA drives individually.

[sirozha]

So, is there a list of individual components compatible with ESXi? I see where you can search for the servers and the chipsets, but as was mentioned here, I need to make sure that the NICs and the HD controllers are supported. I want to be able to run RAID-5 under ESXi and I would prefer using the embedded controller that the server comes with.

[DSTAVERT]

The HCL is tabbed so just select the Storage or IO and search for the controller nic etc. Embedded controllers seldom have ESXi support. They don't have the offload processors and require the OS to provide the RAID parity calculations. ESXi doesn't support that type of controller. You would need one of the hardware controllers (PERC 6 ???) to get RAID 5.

[sirozha]

What about integrated NICs. Are they supported by ESXi or do I need to have an expansion NIC card as well?

[DSTAVERT]

The onboard NICs from Dell, HP, IBM etc are usually well supported. The server specs usually include the Intel, Broadcom, etc model numbers which you can check against the HCL. The reason that embedded raid controllers aren't included is that they are expensive components. High end raid controllers can easily be as expensive as a lower end server. You can forgo a raid controller and use some mechanism to regularly copy Virtual Machines between disks.

[senseless]

I have 3 esxi servers each running a single x3430 without issue.

They're supermicro chassis, not sure which. Everything is performing very well, I split my services up for security purposes.

In regards to your questions about nics. I believe all dell servers above the R200 (which is their super entry level server) work fine with esxi. But i'm not 100% on that.

[J1mbo]

This may be of use to you, as there are always similar deals on the HP ML11x servers.

Please award points to any useful answer.