VMware ESX 4.0 - UPGRADE GUIDE UPDATE 1 Update Manual page 33

Supported on-board SATA include:
Intel ICH9
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Nvidia MCP55
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ServerWorks HT1000
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N Sharing VMFS datastores on SATA disks across multiple ESXi 4.0 hosts is not supported.
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Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) disk drives – Supported for installing ESXi 4.0 and for storing virtual machines
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on VMFS partitions.
USB devices – Supported for installing ESXi 4.0. For more information, refer KB 1010574 at
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.
N For SAS-only environments, the installer might not format the disks. For some SAS disks, it is
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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
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improve ESXi 4.0 performance.
Hardware compatibility – Use devices in your server that are supported by ESXi 4.0 drivers. See the
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Hardware Compatibility Guide at http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility.
VMware, Inc.
Chapter 4 System Requirements
33