Currently my setup is a Windows 2003 server running Exchange 2003. On top of that I havevmware server which manages two virtual machines. One is a Windows 2003 Server runningSQL and one is Linux running the Excellent ISPConfig. ( This is a home setup and is only setup for testing, learning and experimenting purposes )
As the company I work for is currently looking to go all the way to virtualization, I thought it was a good time to get a bit more into it. So I started looking around to the available options. After reading around, I thought I'd give ESX a try. However the hardware requirements are a bit tough. No way could I afford to get a SCSI setup in the house (the wife would kill me!). However there was hope of using sata drives. So my quest to find something cheap that could run ESXbegan.
First of all I got myself ESX 3i on a USB stick using the procedure described herehttp://nsansari.blogspot.com/2008/03/installing-esx-3i-on-usb-stick.html . Then I started using the USB on every PC I could find just to see if it will work. First of all it was the turn of my home PC. This is a 3 1/2 year old PC. The proc is a athlon 2600+ and the motherboard is A7n8x-d. Needless to say it failed to boot and would hang half way through the boot process. After that I tried several other PCs. At work we use dell PCs so I tried those but could not get it to work. Theoptiplex 745, 755, SX270 all failed. The 745 and 755 would boot but ESX would not recognise either the sata drives or the NIC.
Finally I've found the ideal cheap desktop that is all compatible with ESX. Its the HP Compaq d530 sff (small form factor). At £75 I got hold of two of these the spec is 2.8ghz P4, 2 sata controllers, 4 slots for memory (max 4gb). ESX installs without a hitch recognizes all the hardware, NIC, drives and all.
6 comments:
Wait, does that machine have any hardware virtualization support, e.g. VX bit? I thought the performance and poopy-poor on machines that don't have it.
I'm thinking about getting a cheapy Dell SC440 myself...
no this machine does not have any hardware virtualization. As mentioned in the post this is only a cheap setup for testing out ESX and it works as that. Currenlty I am running 4 VM's on this which are serving out email as well as websites with no problems at all.
I just got esx 3.5 running on a crappy 50 Euro Asrock AMD socket 939 mainboard with an AMD Athlon 3200+, 320GB SATA disk and a built in Nvidia Nforce2 ethernet controller. Installed on the first try and runs like a charm. It's got 1.5GB of RAM and is running SBS 2003 and Ubuntu server. ESX 3.0 was very picky about it's hardware, but i'm beginning to think 3.5 will run on just about anything.
Dennes
I got ESX 3.5 running on my Optiplex 745. The install works fine, as I was able to connect to it via VI Client (so the NIC works). The problem though, it doesn't see any HDDs when I connect through VI so I cannot create any datastores. Any idea why the install would work, but then it cannot create any datastores?
As I've said in the original post I was unable to see the hard drives as well. I suppose the sata controller in the 745 is not recognized/compatible with ESX.
Just to meniton I've been testing openfiler (iscsi) on a crappy old computer as VMFS storage and it works great. As a test/play environment and checking out features like Vmotion it works.
My name is atish and my email is ad5670@gmail.com I would like to know if you also host ESX envrionment and I can pay through paypal and use it to perform Labs for ESX 4i and learn something new. I thought of setting up a new environment at home but than it won't give me an enterprise level experience. I hope you understand.
Can you please send your reply to ad5670@gmail.com
thanks for the post.
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