New ESX Enviroment

Maybey you noticed that my blog was sometimes down the last couple of day’s.

This is because Cristmas came early this year for me. The last 5 years I was running
1 ESX 3.5 host. This was a AMD64 2 Ghz with 2 GB of memory. This server was running
3 Virtual Machines. 2 OES2 servers (one of them hosts my blog)
and 1 Windows XP VM (yes, sometimes you need it).

The last year this wasn’t enough, so I bought two new server for myself. Hmm server,
just heavy workstations (HP Pavillion M9550 with 1 Intel Core Quad Q9300 and
4 GB of memory each!). I had to buy extra NIC’s because the onboard NIC isn’t supported.
The NIC wasn’t the only thing that wasn’t supported, even the onboard RAID controoler
isn’t supported. I hear you thinking: “If the NIC and RAID controller isn’t supported for ESX,
why did you buy this hardware.” Let’s say I got a good price out of it.
But how did I got ESX installed? This I find a really nice solution. Like many workstations,
this workstation had a intergrated card read. So I bought 2 Compact Flash cards and
installed ESX 3.5I U3 on them. I removed the 1 TB disk and put them in my old server
where I installed Freenas. I created one RAID1 and published it as a ISCSI volume
to my 2 new ESX 3.5I servers. Create a VMFS volume and copied the machines to
this Datastore.

1 Virtual Machine had a VMDK of 120 GB and one of 250 GB. So you can imaging
the copied took a while. The Windows XP machines is located on my OpenSuse
workstation on a NFS share.

The server who host my blog has to go down one more time, so I can copied to
the right location. So I will be offline one more time. I try to do it at night, but
looking at my stats many people around the world read my blog. So somebody
will notice it. Sorry!