Comments on: Dell PowerEdge T105

By: keith

keith — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 08:39:06 +0000

all,

i have an esxi usb stick which boots fine on my laptop but when installing it into my T105 it states invalid partition – any ideas

thanks

By: Ken Hansen

Ken Hansen — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 04:49:46 +0000

Just a quick note – earlier someone asked what the difference is between an SC440 and T105, very simply, while both target similar markets, the SC440 is Intel-based and the T105 is AMD-based. Aside from that, differences are minor in most regards, though I suspect the T105 has better expandibility than the SC440 (dual PCIe 8x slots in the T105).

Hope that helps.

By: etbe

etbe — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:22:45 +0000

mberri: I’m looking forward to the day when vendors such as Dell start shipping servers with flash storage on the motherboard. The price of a few gig of flash (even when in an expensive USB device and sold independently) is small when compared to a PowerEdge server. The incremental costs of adding it to the motherboard would be negligible.

The USB socket is well designed for an external interface (in terms of being resilient to mechanical issues) but is reputed to not be good for permanent connections. In any case it certainly won’t be as good as something soldered on the motherboard.

If the flash was on the motherboard then it could use a SATA interface which should have the potential of greater performance (although it seems unlikely that the 32MB/s that USB 2.0 can handle will be a great bottleneck in the near future) as well as offering greater compatibility (I have configured machines to boot from USB – but it was significantly more pain than booting from a hard disk).

By: mberri

mberri — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 08:24:50 +0000

@nad:
ESXi will recognise the SATA Disks from the built in controller yes, but you cannot use them for storage nor can you install ESXi itself on there as it will fail, you need to run ESXi from a USB stick, which in my opinion, is better as its a fixed disk not a hard disk which can fail easily.

You need to purchase the Dell SAS6iR SATA/SAS Card in order to create vmfs volumes. This Raid card is listed on the Official IO compatability list, and so is fully supported with VMFS attached to it.

Hope this helps.

By: nad

nad — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 22:40:58 +0000

So does ESXi actually recognise the SATA disks, and can you create VMFS on these. (I’m reading the last comment by mberri) ??

By: mberri

mberri — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 17:35:11 +0000

One more note for prospective buyers, I have VMWare ESXi running successfully, You need to have the SAS 6iR RAID Sata Controller for the storage, and an embedded USB Stick with VMWare Installed.

Once you have created the bootable USB Key, you need to “flip” the bits to make it a fixed disk, not a removeable disk, with a tool called “bootit” by Lexar Media.

Then you can put it into the internal USB port, boot and enjoy VMWare ESX/i.

Regards