I have been off and on playing with VMware’s ESXi Server 3.5 u4 on my Dell Poweredge 2600 that is spec’ed similar to my IBM Server but has 6GB of RAM instead of 3GB. So far I have 4 VM’s running on it and it seems like a sweet spot for me as far as speed and responsiveness goes. I have a Development ‘box’ running Windows 2003 Server Standard w/ SQL Server 2005 and is given 2GB of RAM to play with. I also have a Windows 2008 ‘box’ that I gave 2GB of RAM to as I plan to make it my DC one day when it is slated to take over as my main Server and I also want it to one day do the TS Gateway thing. I have a third VM running Ubuntu JeOS Linux 9.04 and I gave it 512M of RAM. It will become my Shell server for now. As my last VM I have Windows XP Professional SP3 with 512M of RAM going as a ‘desktop’ machine of sorts. It is mainly for if my workstation is offline and I need to remote in and access workstation related things, it will be up for that as long as the server is on. The only thing I am working on still is the storage solution for my data. I am getting a couple of refurbished 500GB drives from Western Digital when they come back from repair and plan to do a software RAID1. I may be getting another 1 or 2 bad 500GB drives that are still under warranty to return and get replacements that will end up being my spares for when a drive fails. I already have some spare SCSI drives for the main array. Once I get those drives I will have to spend a fun Saturday configuring everything. Once I get the system mostly completed I will have to test it for a few weeks before making it live. Yes, I do this kind of thing for home use. I don’t like having the system fail on me right out of the gate. It will be nice to have one big system doing the job of 4 machines.
Sep 14
2 comments
Hi Jacob, are you successfully using Dell’s openmanage to manage your poweredge 2600 running ESXi 3.5 u4?
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I was never able to get the Openmanage thing to work and may have been doing something wrong. When I looked at the install ISO I did not see any difference, for the most part, compared to the default image. I know there is a size difference so maybe looking at just the ISO was not enough. For the most part, I did not have issues with ESXi on my Poweredge. Everything ran like it should. I ended up just slapping Windows 2008 on it for a few reasons. The link below gives more details on why.
http://www.lackofpants.com/blog/2009/10/27/bout-time/
I think the major setback for the Openmanage thing for me was that there was almost no documentation on how to get it working. I looked on Vmware’s site with nothing useful to find and it was difficult to find any info at all on Dell’s site.