ESXi 6.7 with AMD Ryzen 7 2700

[Gamle]

Hi LTT Forum.

 

I am considering to buy hardware for a mini home server and I will like to run ESXi 6.7 on it, but I am confused around ESXi compatibility.

 

Hardware list

• AMD Ryzen 7 2700
• ASUS ROG Strix B450-I
• Corsair TX550M 550 Watt
• Kingston HyperX FURY DDR4, 2x16GB, DIMM 288-PIN, 2933 MHz.

Do anyone have experience with ESXi 6.7 and AMD Ryzen Gen 2 compatibility? Because it will be a little bit sad to buy all that hardware if it doesn't work.

[191x7]

vSphere? I know it supports 16 cores(threads)

 

https://communities.vmware.com/thread/585657

[nka]

You are trying to build a server with consumer grade material. There's no official HCL for that. You'll have to either try it or find someone who did it before you.

 

You will most likely have problems detecting drives on this motherboard, so you may need to add an Hardware RAID Adapter.

 

What are you trying to do with ESXi at home ?

edit: I'm asking that cause, running ESXi at home is a bit of PITA. It's very picky on the hardware, you'll have to do some drivers injection and will have problems to upgrade. Plus, there's no real "avantages" if you are running only one server (at 3, you could use vSAN and stuff like this). You should take a look at unRAID. I was avoiding unRAID for a long time. As a IT Administrator, I didn't like the "wannabe-raid" that unRAID is using.. but one day I tried to used it since I had problems with my FreeNAS and needed a rebuild. This software is so simple, every problems I had have a very simple solution (for example, my SSD Crashed and I lost all of my Dockers... I just reinstalled all the Dockers from the Template and didnt even have to reconfigure). You can install Dockers in like a couples seconds (very usefull to try applications). You want Plex? Search, click install, done ! I didnt like the "RAID" at first... but it's working very well... and it allow you to grow without having the change the whole RAID stack !

[NelizMastr]

1 hour ago, nka said:

What are you trying to do with ESXi at home ?

It's a free hypervisor, so why not? An alternative would be Hyper-V Server, but compared to ESXi it's kinda crap like most recent Microsoft inventions.

 

Quote

 Plus, there's no real "avantages" if you are running only one server (at 3, you could use vSAN and stuff like this).

You can still just have a single hypervisor with a handful of VMs that do stuff for you. Just use direct attached storage. vSAN is a paid feature anyway.

 

Quote

You should take a look at unRAID. I was avoiding unRAID for a long time. As a IT Administrator, I didn't like the "wannabe-raid" that unRAID is using.. but one day I tried to used it since I had problems with my FreeNAS and needed a rebuild.

It depends entirely on the use case. If you're after an easy to use storage system and you don't mind paying for it, UnRAID is a great system. For a home server that does some light tasks but much more than just storage, like a web server AND file server AND maybe a Windows AD for fun and networking stuff like Unifi controllers etc., there's not much on offer with UnRAID compared to the likes of ESXi, HyperV, Proxmox and XPC-ng.

[Gamle]

2 hours ago, nka said:

What are you trying to do with ESXi at home ?

Terminal server, Plex server, Web server, VoIP server, Node.JS server for scripts, Exchange server for testing/learning, Be able to make a server for testing when in need and for temporary operations.

 

2 hours ago, nka said:

You should take a look at unRAID. I was avoiding unRAID for a long time. As a IT Administrator, I didn't like the "wannabe-raid" that unRAID is using.

I have tried unRAID and i don't like it for the purpose I will be using that server. It's good for file server, docker and plex but I don't like it that much too the other things. For file server I'll keep using my Synology

 

3 hours ago, nka said:

You are trying to build a server with consumer grade material. There's no official HCL for that.

I know, but it's a home server for me to play with and I can take some down time. I will like it to run stable, but I don't wanna use that amount on supported hardware and I will like something there don't drain power from the outlet. Electricity is expensive in the country I am leving in.

 

3 hours ago, nka said:

You'll have to either try it or find someone who did it before you.

I was hoping a little bit to finding someone there have tried something like my setup. But if not, I'll have to try it like you say.

 

5 hours ago, 191x7 said:

I know it supports 16 cores(threads)

Thanks.

 

1 hour ago, NelizMastr said:

there's not much on offer with UnRAID compared to the likes of ESXi, HyperV, Proxmox and XPC-ng.

I guess that I will have to try one of the others if ESXi don't work.

[nka]

That's why I'm asking what he want to do with it, I'm not sur ESXi is the "best way to go".

 

If he want to run ESXi, he might end-up buying a 100$ raid card just to make it run fine... with unraid, he might just go with the onboard SATA ports, then 100$ license is payed!

[nka]

The problems with non-HCL stuff, you have to "make it work", it's not (most of time) working out of the box. Then, it may fail when you update since it's not "supported". With HCL server.

 

Just FYI, I'm not trying to sell you unRAID, I love ESXI, I run 5 ESXi 6.5 servers and trying to make one with 6.7 that giving me hardtime with the RAID Controller right now.

 

I got unRAID at home: sharing files on the local network, VPN, Plex Server, nextcloud, node-red, GitEA for my "home github", reverse proxy (nginx) for internal website (like home automation NodeRED and GitEA). They are all dockers, the only part I don't use is the "VM" parts, but when I tried, it was working pretty nicely !

[Guest]

Don't do it, you won't have any ethernet drivers probably

ESXI is meant to run only on servers hardware, unless you got experience in building kernel modules and porting linux drivers to esxi, don't do it

Just use a Linux distro, there are GUI's for running virtual machines like esxi

[Scheer]

Ethernet is the big issue you might run into, but you can get an Intel Pro 1000 card for about $15.

 

Other than than, I've installed ESXi on a ton of systems and the only one I've had issues with was oddly enough a Supermicro board's SATA controller that was on the HCL... Had to change something via CL and its been fine since. As best I can remember they have always been Intel based, but everything from tiny J1800/1900 boards to gaming and server boards, most of which haven't been on the HCL.

 

Since you are actually going to use it for server stuff, I'd check eBay and get a used Supermicro board and a couple generation old Xeon. You'll want a lot of RAM, and Registered ECC DDR3 is dirt cheap. Be careful the board doesn't need U-Dimms, as those are still really pricey. Mainly only the low end Xeon's use it like what you'd find in a Lenovo TS140 or Dell T20.

 

This would be about the same passmark score as the 2700, but more cores which is typically better when you have lots of VMs: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-Xeon-E5-2670V2-SR1A7-2-50GHz-10-Core-CPU-115W-25MB-Ivy-Bridge-LGA2011/132730024208?hash=item1ee7537110:g:FA0AAOSwyD9bZO-v:rk:1:pf:0

Works with this mobo: https://www.ebay.com/itm/Supermicro-X9SRA-ATX-Intel-Motherboard-LGA2011-DDR3-USB3-0/143152882562?hash=item215493a382:g:G9gAAOSwm1VceHEV:rk:3:pf:0

64GB of RAM: https://www.ebay.com/itm/64GB-8x-8GB-Samsung-M393B1K70DH0-DDR3-PC3-12800R-ECC-REG-DIMM-Server-Memory/264209454671?hash=item3d841c564f:g:5-4AAOSwE6VccC0L:rk:10:pf:0

 

All for $435. I didn't look very hard, I'm sure there are better deals out there.

 

Or you could step up to a X10 board which uses v3/v4 CPUs. The V4's are still pretty expensive used, and you'll need DDR4 RAM, but you could get a V3 now and upgrade later if you need the performance.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/SUPERMICRO-X10SRA-B-ATX-Server-Motherboard-LGA-2011-3-Socket-R3-C612-no-X10SRA-F/183689263710?hash=item2ac4bbba5e:g:LWIAAOSwrhNcaMGr:rk:1:pf:0

[Gamle]

33 minutes ago, Scheer said:

Ethernet is the big issue you might run into, but you can get an Intel Pro 1000 card for about $15.

 

1 hour ago, Lukyp said:

Don't do it, you won't have any ethernet drivers probably

 

3 hours ago, nka said:

The problems with non-HCL stuff, you have to "make it work", it's not (most of time) working out of the box.

 

Sounds like it will be better just get my old power hungry computer out of the closet and pay for about double the power consumption. Until I need more machine power.

 

Edit: I pay ~$0.317 kwh

 

Because I know that this hardware can run ESXI with ethernet and onboard SATA.

• ASUS Sabertooth X79
• Intel Core i7-4930K
• Kingston DDR3 HyperX Beast 2x8 GB 1600mhz (I can always buy more)

What do you guys think?

[DogKnight]

I run ESXI on home hardware. It's an i7 5820k, Gigabyte X99 G1 Gaming WIFI, 32gb DDR4 (Corsair LPX). 

Surprisingly almost all hardware was detected without driver modification including the Intel NIC, the Killer Networks NIC and the Atheros Killer WIFI. 

 

It is a bit of luck with the motherboard support. Clearly the motherboard I am using is targeted towards high end gaming, but it works well. The only thing that doesn't work is the motherboards RAID option. When I configure a couple drives in RAID, ESXI refuses to see the RAID volume and just shows the individual drives for installation. 

 

[lacion]

I ran a bunch of ESXi on consumer hardware with not much of an issue (intel based.)

 

I have to say my experience with Virtualization with AMD has been ... catastrophic something always fails or is erroring out, weird crashes all around (ubuntu 18.04 based servers and Hyper-V), never had issues with Intel-based virt. also just as a note, I have not seemed any penalty on running ESXi, XEN or KVM compared to Hyper-V (i run a linux desktop in hyper-v for development and working with docker I user mobaxterm as my term and point xserver on the linux desktop to moba using an internal nic, works perfectly.)

[Gamle]

To answer my own question for people there find this thread with the same question in mind.

 

I am running a server with VMWare 6.7.0 U3. It can run and works, but it's not server hardware so like expected. There are hardware reading problems like tempature etc. but the VMs are running just fine.

 

Hardware

• AMD Ryzen 5 3600
• ASUS ROG Strix B450-I
• Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4-3200 C16 BK DC - 32GB