Help with virtual homeseer setup esxi

[hunter69]

I have some choices to make and I want to make the best decisions regarding the setup. The choices I have to make (for hardware setup)

cpu # of sockets, # of virtual cpu. I am thinking 1 socket with 2 virtual cpu

Hardrive size and provisioning. Thin or thick provisioning. I am thinking 20 gig hd with thin provisioning.

Amount of ram: I am thinking 4 gig

OS: Win XP, Win 7 32 bit or Win 7 64bit. I am thinking of Win 7 64 bit

Serial port question: I am setting up serial port pass-through. One question it asks is "serial ports in polled mode".

I would love to get some input to setup this server for the best performance.

Thanks for any and all help. I greatly appreaciate it
Bill

[Pete]

Bill,

Personally I would recommend a 32bit virtual OS unless you want to work more on making Homeseer work with the OS rather than having an OS that you can spend more time working on Homeseer. (sounds contradictory but its really not).

Check out the "done that already" posts on the forum relating to utilizing a 64 bit OS whether its virtual or real.

My personal "at home" for just "Homeseer" experience (not commercial which was a totally "testing" different thing I did) has been with:

1 - VM for workstation
2 - W2003 and XP OS virtual Homeseer application set ups
3 - taking my 1 wire USB to many HS hardware devices (usb and serial) making them virtual via the LAN. BTW - all Digi boxes (Digi USB hub, Digi USB anywhere and Digi edgeports). I was into more the hardware to Homeseer piece rather than just the Homeseer application piece which worked just fine.
4 - CPU procs et al where what would work for me (think I went typically to 2Gb instead of 4Gb but 2 cores all of the time).

Homeseer worked just fine except for two gotcha's. One was getting the USB to Homeseer W2C telephony device working. I got this working using a Lantronics USB to networking hardware device. The second one was on a "lark" and that was getting a USB sound card for a second instance of HS Speaker TTS to work on a virtual machine. Again also utilizing a Lantronics serial to networking device. This testing utilized my then current configuration of HS Pro, HSTouch clients, scripts, events and variables as running on the Homeseer box. I didn't do metrics on the running of Homeseer at the time; but just watched it and it did fine. Performance was a non issue when testing. Today I am thinking there might be a few users testing V.58/V.60 virtually collecting performance metrics on said endeavors.

While I am not a server hugger and advocate the use of VM ware I like playing with hardware more. (IE: today my mcsSprinklers for Linux sits on a Seagate Dockstar running Arch Linux connected to two Rain8Nets and sits inside of my old rainbird box - still with all the identical features set of the HS plugin running on Homeseer).

If I can have a Homeseer "do all" box the size of my palm with one connection to say 20 hardware devices hidden behind a touchscreen interface or indiscriminately mounted on the board next to my W2C box. Its my habit or "candy" or HA addiction.

[hunter69]

Ok I trust your recommendation. I am thinking:

Windows 7 32bit
4gig ram (32 bit limitation)
20 gig hd (will this be enough, although because this is virtualized I believe I can shutdown the homeseer server and expand the drive). Is 20 gig big enough?

Do you have any suggestions as to thick vs thin provisioning (esxi)

I have a quad core xeon cpu. I can provision 1 or more cores. With Hyperthreading I have 8 cpus available. So 4 physical cores and 8 hyperthreaded cores. I am thinking of:
1 physical core and 2 hyperthreaded cores. Opinions?

[Pete]

Bill,

I use 20Gb builds today for the partition sizes on real and virtual Homeseer servers. Very fast and easy to traverse the Gb LAN.

Hardware utilize 4Gb with 3Gb being utilized for XP/W2003 (different for W7 though). VM used 2Gb because of the personal HW limitations.

If you go thin you just have to work more (piecemealing it) at what to add versus going thick with a spat of everything included. IE: On a different subject; the HSTouch client running a thin XP3 with TTS, Java, Dot Net et al is just about 3Gb fully loaded just for HSTouch running off an 8Gb SSD with a 1 Gb pagefile.

You have "lots of room" to be flexible such that you can mix and match different virtual settings such that the Hardware will not be a bottleneck to your experimenting relating to maximum use of the 32bit OS.

There are a "few" Homeseer folks already doing this using HS in production and that can provide much more in depth and just relating to ESXI stuff than me though.

[hunter69]

Do you currently build homeseer servers with win 7 or xp? I was leaning towards win 7 due to being able to resize the system partition (if needed) and Win 7 being the mainstream OS that manufacturers are developing for. Am I over thinking this?

[Pete]

Production only W2003 Standard these days.

Tested W7 32/64 bit, WHS first gen based on W2003 32 bit then WHS second gen R2 (W2008 64 bit).

W7 32 bit - fast and easy
W7 64 bit - much baggage and work arounds in OS - got it to work
WHS W2003 32 bit - fast and easy
WHS W2008 64 bit - much baggage - had some major issues with TTS. I "inserted" the W7 pieces to get it to work. They turned WHS in to an "al la carte" propietary OS. Makes more money for MS if you sell each piece of the OS as a separate entity rather than just giving you everything.

Am I over thinking this?

Yes.

Primarily be concerned with making HS work with little mods or tweaking of the OS rather than modding the OS to work with Homeseer. It will let you savor the application rather than the OS (like a fine wine). I understand that most software companies are developing for W7/W8 these days and that XP is now pretty much EOL. I think of Homeseer more as a just for HA appliance considering that its only purpose in life is to do HA for my home. This said it really doesn't matter what OS it runs on. Today I cannot tell the difference between XBMC running on a Wintel box (whatever OS it is) and a Linux box (whatever HW or OS its running on). It doesn't really matter though to me. This is me and my personal opinion.

[hunter69]

When you stated the following:

If you go thin you just have to work more (piecemealing it) at what to add versus going thick with a spat of everything included.

Were you referring to (just making sure we were talking about the same thing) whe I am creating my 20 gig hard disk, selecting between:

• Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed
• Thick Provision Eager Zeroed
• Thin Provision

Thanks for all the input. I am busy trying to get my homeseer server created and working.
Bill

[reidfo]

I agree completely with Pete's observations here. I personally run HS on Windows 2008 R2 64-bit, hosted on ESXi. TTS took a little fiddling to make work but was easy once I found the trick (use the 32-bit control panel speech applet). The only other issue I have had with the 64 bit OS is that some plugins (especially older ones) don't understand the C:\Program Files (x86)\ folder and try to write directly to C:\Program Files\. I fixed that by just installing HomeSeer into C:\HSPRO instead.

[hunter69]

Thanks for the info. DO you have any input on

• Thick Provision Lazy Zeroed
• Thick Provision Eager Zeroed
• Thin Provision

SO the other question I am struggling with is
number of virtual sockets
number of cores per socket

What is best practice?

[Pete]

Found this:

http://planetzorg.wordpress.com/2011...hin-provision/

Homeseer by nature does a lot of head banging. Plugins, scripts, variables, multiple DBs and logging stuff.

My best guess would be Thick Provision Lazy Zero though based on running Homeseer on whatever versus VM.

Personally though I have never looked at the metrics of the RW's and R stuff. Watched the flickering of the HD. Never really flickers though; the LED just stays lite.

CPU load is minimal but NIC loads can be whatever. I utilize Gb for the HS boxes these days and see the application really gets taxed some versus taxing the NIC.

[hunter69]

Thanks I was obviously editing my thread when you posted do you minded looking at my question about

number of virtual sockets
number of cores per socket

Thanks again for being so helpful
Bill

[Pete]

Bill 1/2 should work.

I ran HS for "years" on 1 CPU and 2 cores. (well really hyperthreading so it wasn't really 2 cores).

Today I have two and two HS Pro / HS Standard machines.

One pair of boxes has an Atom based CPU which is one CPU, 2 Cores and 4 threads.

The other pair the CPU is an Intel Core Duo which is one CPU and 2 cores and 2 threads.

They both do well running Homeseer.

That said experiment.

Try one virtual socket with two cores, then four cores et al. Then try 2 virtual sockest each with two cores and so forth.

Also on the back burner keep in mind that you are running at 32 bits versus 64 bits. You can bottleneck the mutiple threading on your multilane virtual highway.

Off on tangent....Just thinking back here of negociating a multiple license business objects contract (really via sas though) and getting into some wierd number of cores pricing that I had to deal with similiarly like a 2 for 1 deal which really was closer to paying for two licenses with two cores rather than one license pricing a bit more for 2 cores; and how the quick talking CS would logically make sense of their new pricing model (similiar to a used car salesmens tactics).

[reidfo]

1 socket 2 cores vs. 2 sockets 1 core shouldn't make a difference. Either way you're utilizing multiple virtual CPUs and both Windows and HomeSeer can take advantage of that. I just simplify things and give each of my machines 1 socket with 1-4 cores each depending on the application. I an running a quad core Xeon without hyperthreading and gave HomeSeer 2 cores. I also have iSpy doing motion detection on one IP camera running on the same VM. My CPU hovers around 35-40%, nearly all of which is iSpy.

On the disk provisioning you'll see better performance with thick provisioning.

[Automated]

I run fully virtualized here, with VM for HS sitting on a SSD vSphere datastore. HS runs very stable, with over a dozen plugins and over 100 zwave devices. I have no issues or hacks needed and am running 64bit Win7. If I recall correctly, I dedicate 2 cores of a 4 core, hyper threaded Sandy Bridge CPU, and dedicate 4 GB to the machine. This runs for many weeks before I end up doing some development work that requires a reboot for whatever reason.