Amahi Forums

Just thought I'd share my new setup with everyone, as I'm now running Amahi (6.2) in a VM on ESXi - hopefully it might help someone who is considering this!

I've got an HP Proliant Microserver, the N36L model with 8Gb RAM. I was previously running the Fedora version of Amahi on the server, installed natively on a 60Gb 2.5" SATA drive, with a 500 GB drive for data which was getting full, so I decided it was time for upgrade...

I bought a couple of 1Tb drives to increase my storage, and I decided to run ESXi on the server as i'm familiar with VMware from work.

I detached the old drives, then installed ESX on to a 16Gb Sandisk USB stick, which is what the server now boots from. The Microserver has an internal USB slot which is ideal for this.

As I didn't want to risk losing my existing data, I used one of the new 1TB drives to create a datastore in ESX to hold the VM for Amahi, then created a new VM and installed Ubuntu server edition (12.04 LTS). For now I've given the VM 1Gb of Memory and 2 Processors. I created a Virtual drive of about 15Gb for the Ubuntu install. Next, installed Amahi which all went smoothly.

I then attached my old 500Gb drive as an RDM (Raw Device Mapping) disk and followed the instructions on the Wiki for re-attaching your old greyhole storage, which worked great. I could see all my data. I then added another RDM for the other 1TB drive and added this to the storage pool, again using the wiki guide.

As my OS drive is only small, I moved the landing zone for my shares onto the 1TB disk, after a bit of fiddling with the shares and greyhole, I got it to balance the storage between the two drives. Happy days!

My next plan is to wipe the old 60Gb drive and shift the VM onto that so I can free up the other 1TB drive for additional storage.

I really only use the Amahi server for DLNA streaming, file storage and a bit of Transmission and so far performance is absolutely fine running with this setup.

The only problem I've found is that the vSphere client for ESXi 5.0 doesn't play nicely with Windows 8, so I might be upgrading to 5.1 soon.

Some useful links:

HP Proliant Microserver
VMware ESXi Free Version
Adding RDM SATA disks to ESX

cheers
Rich

great write-up.

good to see others trying the virtualized path as well.

Awesome thanks for your sharing. Im in in the process of saving and planning of doing the same but with promox.

My plan is to get 4 drives in RAID10 and through promox and the VM's on there. Then I thought of getting a a cheap DLINK nas that I always fine on kijiji and use that as my backup storage.

But I really want to do the VM. Be great for testing and playing with other OSes.