VMware vSphere 4 Installation Guide download pdf (Page 31)

ServerWorks HT1000

NOTE ESXi does not support using local, internal SATA drives on the host server to create VMFS datastores

that are shared across multiple ESXi hosts.

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives – Supported for installing ESXi 4.0 and for storing virtual machines

on VMFS partitions.

USB devices – Supported for installing ESXi 4.0. For more information, refer KB 1010574 at

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1010574.

Recommendation for Enhanced ESXi Performance

To enhance performance, VMware recommends that you install ESXi on a robust system with more RAM than

the minimum required and with multiple physical disks.

Consider the following recommendations for enhanced performance:

RAM – ESXi 4.0 hosts require more RAM than typical servers. An ESXi 4.0 host must be equipped with

sufficient RAM to run concurrent virtual machines.

For example, operating four virtual machines with Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Windows XP requires at

least 3GB of RAM for baseline performance. This includes approximately 1024MB for the virtual machines

(256MB minimum for each operating system as recommended by vendors).

Running these four virtual machines with 512MB RAM requires that the ESXi 4.0 host be equipped with

approximately 4GB RAM, which includes 2048MB for the virtual machines.

These calculations do not take into account possible memory savings from using variable overhead

memory for each virtual machine. See the Resource Management Guide.

Dedicated Fast Ethernet adapters for virtual machines – Place the management network and virtual

machine networks on different physical network cards. Dedicated Gigabit Ethernet cards for virtual

machines, such as Intel PRO 1000 adapters, improve throughput to virtual machines with high network

traffic.

Disk location – Place all data used by your virtual machines on physical disks allocated specifically to

virtual machines. Performance is better when you do not place your virtual machines on the disk

containing the ESXi 4.0 Installable boot image. Use physical disks that are large enough to hold disk images

used by all the virtual machines.

VMFS3 partitioning – The ESXi 4.0 installer creates the initial VMFS volumes automatically on blank local

disks. To add disks or modify the original configuration, use the vSphere Client. This application ensures

that the starting sectors of partitions are 64K-aligned, which improves storage performance.

NOTE For SAS-only environments, the installer might not format the disks. For some SAS disks, it is

difficult to identify whether the disks are local or remote. After the installation, you can use the vSphere

Client to set up VMFS.

Processors – Faster processors improve ESXi 4.0 performance. For certain workloads, larger caches

improve ESXi 4.0 performance.

Hardware compatibility – Use devices in your server that are supported by ESXi 4.0 drivers. See the

Hardware Compatibility Guide at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.

Chapter 4 System Requirements

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VMware vSphere 4 Installation Guide Page 31