My Dream System (I think)

[Rand]

Excellent point with Licenses.

From a networking point of view this is not so complicated, but you need a bunch of VMs to run Vmware Horizon (at some point, not all necessarily at all times) - AD controller, vCenter , Horizon View, Client VMs, and of course Thin or Zero Clients to connect from
Then you get in High Availability scenarios (what if the view server is gone? Or AD?) then potentially vSan... Its a mess, but you learn a lot and its nifty when it runs :)

 

[gpsguy]

Thanks for mentioning the Windows licenses. For many years I had a MS Technet subscription at home. I was honest and only claimed the licenses I needed. I wish that back when I had 10 licenses per product, that I'd claimed them (even if I didn't use them). Damn the bad guys for ruing a great program.

I don't really want to spent the $$'s for MSDN (at home).

 

[Rand]

So you don't have the serial numbers? :/
B/C those are still valid for multiple installations even if you only used one back then...

 

[gpsguy]

I have my keys and can still see them on my (expired) Technet account. I thought some of the keys were good for muliple installations, ala MAK, others like my Windows 7/8 licenses required their own product key. For example on some of my products I claimed "3 of 3". As I recall, the Pro version, originally gave me 10 keys per product, before they started whittling it down.

I should be okay on my licenses. Before my subscription expired, I claimed a few extra licenses and grabbed any media downloads that I might want to use in the future.

 

[Mirfster]

Look at becoming a MS Partner and get the "Action Pack". It costs me ~$500.00/year (which I write off as a business expense), but I get lots or licenses for "Internal Use" only. All I really had to do was take a test online in regards to Microsoft Licensing, which was like 5 years ago. I think they may be changing some stuff about it, but don't recall off the top of my head right now.

This PDF lists the licenses.

 

[Rand]

Iirc MSDN OS only subscription was a bit cheaper (oc limited to OS's) but great deal (and combineable with Action pack to be covered really well for a small company).

What I wanted to add to my original point - if the VDI environment is not supposed to cope with Video or fast action items then probably a RDP based (Terminal Server) setup might be a simpler alternative. There are various client devices for that available (even RPi 2/3 via RP Thin Client project, http://rpitc.blogspot.com/)

 

[joeschmuck]

Before you get started - think about licensing. While you can get a 60 day trial license for VDI, they don't offer a perpetual free one.

When I looked into VDI last year I realized I'd have to pay for a license for the proper OS to make this happen and learn a heck of a lot to even make it work. I'd love to see something fairly simple like a VDI for Ubuntu, something free. I know that I can run individual VMs, even a Windows VM without licensing issues (I have a few copies not current installed) but as I see it, if I lets say use Remote Desktop to get into the VM and then I accidentally tell it to shutdown, well I'd not be able to restart it unless I manually restarted the VM. This would not work for my father or wife. It would ideal if there was a way to ESXi to be triggered into powering up the VM. Maybe some application on the remote computer could send a signal to ESXi to boot the specific VM. I'm not sure if there is a specific command line that I could put into a batch file to do that and then have them click on the link to launch the VM. Tricky stuff.

And yes, I'm cheap so if it costs me more that $200 total, for life, then it's not for me.

 

[joeschmuck]

Look at becoming a MS Partner and get the "Action Pack". It costs me ~$500.00/year

I looked at the PDF first and then started to drool, until I came back to the original posting and read the $500/year. :(

 

[Mirfster]

I looked at the PDF first and then started to drool, until I came back to the original posting and read the $500/year. :(

Get a business license and write it off or if you ever do any contacting work (1099) then write it off there. Since I recall you mentioning that you work remotely, you could possibly leverage that as write off. More than one way to skin a cat.

 

[jgreco]

Get a business license and write it off or if you ever do any contacting work (1099) then write it off there. Since I recall you mentioning that you work remotely, you could possibly leverage that as write off. More than one way to skin a cat.

The IRS is onto the scam of making a hobby into a business through getting a business license and running a Schedule C business and then claiming all your hobby stuff as a business expense. Generally speaking, they want to see some profitability before they allow writeoffs and they can even get kinda nasty if they think you're gaming the system, even if you're profitable.

Writing something off is not the same thing as getting it for free, in any case.

If I get $1000 in income without anything to offset, at maybe 30% tax (federal income, medicare, FICA), I pay $300 in tax and end up with $700 in cash.

If I get $1000 in income and spend $500 on equipment, at 30% tax, that's $500 in equipment "tax free", $150 in tax, and $350 in cash. True, I've saved $150 in taxes but I've spent $500 to get there. I end up with a lot less cash.

Now, of course, if you were going to buy that thing anyways, this is a total win.

 

[Mirfster]

Agreed, not saying to try an circumvent the IRS and you do not get 100% of what you spent. However, it does get complicated. I have been in the position of having a 1099 (as a contractor), W2 (as a full time employee) as well as my business filings all in the same year(s). When I went to file I realized that was way above my head, so I found some good accountants instead. In the end I was buying it anyways so better to get the write-offs.

 

[joeschmuck]

So back to my dream system... It's working very well and I have no complaints but now it's time to see if I need to make it more robust.

My system is laid out with two SSD's (256GB where ESXi, and two VMs reside, 120GB SSD where a few small VMs reside, and a 1TB 2.5" laptop hard drive where non-critical VMs reside and ISO images and patches, etc...) and I know this is not the best layout for an ESXi server with respect to drive failure. So I'm looking to fix this and I believe I need to mirror the drives but I'm not quite certain I can do that without more hardware. I need to keep in mind that this is a home system and it's my own money paying for this so it needs to be priced reasonably. Or I need to figure out how to backup my VM images and ESXi configuration to a different NAS (I have one available that will hold about 1.5TB of storage). So these are things I'm going to be looking into. My priorities are: 1) Low but reasonable cost, 2) Not complicated restoration/correction of a drive failure.

Right now I'm not in favor of using my FreeNAS storage for the ESXi backup/recovery of course, however I could use it for VM's that are not FreeNAS. Of course restoring FreeNAS is easy since I retain a copy of the configuration file and I could just build that up again. ESXi isn't too bad to rebuild from scratch but I'd rather not as it will take time to do it and relearn what I did to get to this point, even though I do have most of it written down.

Yes, I'm blabbing...

 

[jgreco]

Okay, easy enough. ESXi lacks any native support for mirroring or other software redundancy options. Your cheapest solution is an M1015 in *IR* (not IT) mode. Or any other well-supported RAID controller under ESXi. Then you get a cheap extra 120GB SSD, and mirror that with your original 120, and then boot off RAID1 SSD. You can of course do that with your 256GB instead if preferred. Or both!

You can of course RAID1 whatever you like, but HDD on the low end RAID controllers is really poorly performing because there's no write cache. SSD isn't so terrible. Was just discussing that last week with someone;

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/esxi-home-server-freenas.43527/page-3#post-289705

In general, I feel that you should probably stick with the slightly better quality SSD's like the Intel 535's and the Samsung 850 Evo's which do seem to work just fine on the backside of a RAID controller, but I'm a notorious cheapskate and I've been working with the PNY CS1311 960GB and SanDisk Ultra II 960GB SSD's these past few months. I didn't do extensive testing with them on the LSI's ... they're destined for some Synology DiskStation NAS units.

Anyways, the expense of getting a good-performing HDD RAID controller (which has write cache) is so great that it should be tempting just to avoid that and get SSD instead, unless you need a pile of space. For a small system, the cheap RAID plus SSD is *probably* going to be cheaper. Though you can probably prove me wrong if you eBay intelligently.

For cheap backups on ESXi, look at ghettoVCB. But you'll be getting seriously under the hood of ESXi if you do that. As in, be comfortable modifying the firmware of an appliance class device that's the virtualization equivalent of FreeNAS. Which I suggest you can and should do.

 

[Spearfoot]

Thank you, @joeschmuck, for starting this thread, which I've been following with keen interest.

I set up my all-in-one FreeNAS-on-VMware system following the KISS principle. I boot VMware ESXi 6 from a USB stick. I use a pair of 60GB SSD datastores as mirrored boot drives for the FreeNAS VM. All of my other virtual machines are delivered from the FreeNAS VM using NFS.

I regularly save a copy of the ESXi configuration, so if the USB stick fails all I have to do is re-install ESXi on a new stick and restore my configuration. No big deal.

I save my FreeNAS configuration to another system every night. If one of the SSDs fail, all I have to do is replace it. If they both fail, I'll have to re-install FreeNAS and restore my configuration from the latest nightly copy. Still not a big deal.

The FreeNAS pool is a 7 x 2TiB RAIDZ2 array. Granted, this is not the optimal (mirrored) setup for VM storage. But it's plenty good enough for me: I'm the only user, it works just fine for the light load I put on it, and I judged it to be the best compromise between capacity and redundancy... plus it uses 7 of the 8 ports on my system's built-in LSI SAS controller, leaving the 8th port for an Intel S3700 ZIL SLOG device.

Every night, a scheduled script syncs the FreeNAS datasets to my Synology NAS, which in turn backs itself up to one of a pair of eSATA-attached 6TiB WDC 'Black' drives. The other member of the pair is always in my fireproof gunsafe.

I probably ought to keep a third 6TiB drive offsite... but if my house burns down, destroying all my systems, and manages to eventually burn through the safe and destroy the last-resort backup disk, why, I'll have more important things to worry about, won't I? :)

Besides, I have copies of important documents and financial data on a thumb drive I keep on my person.

Anyway, @jgreco's post above has me thinking I need to get an M1015 and improve/tweak my ESXi installation.

Yes, I'm blabbing, too...

 

[Mirfster]

TBH, I am finding my experiment fun. While it may be a bit off the "proven" track I will eventually post (in a new thread so not to hijack) about how I have mine configured and get some input/feedback more than likely some "what...why?" stuff too. /I can see jgreco already chomping at the bit to hit me over the head with a mechanical keyboard... ;)

 

[beeph]

I always used to marvel at the costs of pro software and tools but there's good reason for it. Consumer market though, definitely.. go with the freeware. I buy the 60$ wrench.. if i bust a knuckle I don't work on my car for a week. A mechanic might do 20 jobs in that week - he buys the 500$ snapon that is 1% better.

A startup being financed - same deal, each day faster to market might net them 2-3 million$ more in market cap (per day). the 500$ software license doesn't look so expensive in that perspective.

The reason linux won the server market wasn't because it was free.. it was because it was BETTER.

 

[titan_rw]

For cheap backups on ESXi, look at ghettoVCB. But you'll be getting seriously under the hood of ESXi if you do that. As in, be comfortable modifying the firmware of an appliance class device that's the virtualization equivalent of FreeNAS. Which I suggest you can and should do.

Once setup, this is actually extremely reliable. My home esxi box backs up to freenas this way. Never had an issue, vm's are always backed up.

At work, we use symantec (veritas now?) backup exec. It's always having trouble backing up this vm, or that vm for various reasons.

 

[jgreco]

ghettoVCB can easily be made to fall over, the canonical example would be "with snapshots."

But the price is right if you can cope with some mild limitations.

 

[jgreco]

I can see jgreco already chomping at the bit to hit me over the head with a mechanical keyboard... ;)

If you're sufficiently offensive, I can always try the dual-keyboard scissors-style decapitation.

 

[joeschmuck]

Thank you, @joeschmuck, for starting this thread, which I've been following with keen interest.

This thread has helped a few people and that is good. I started out desiring to try ESXi and several generous people here have helped keep me on the right path. I'm very happy with my choice and as you can see I have more questions to make my system more robust, or really survivable. I also like to take my time getting from point A to point B, I want to understand what I'm doing.