Max Lyth

More disappointment was in store for my research when I came to partition the disks. I had bought three 1.5TB disks which I intended to mostly deploy as RAID5 which would total around 2.7TB in actual storage. I already knew that ESX4i has a 2TB limit for the maximum size of a single VMFS partition although they can bridge disks using extents to much larger sizes.

Adaptec’s web site lists the 5405 as being capable of multiple LUNs so my strategy was to initially deploy a small 8GB Raid5 LUN for ESX boot, a 96GB Raid0 stripe LUN as VM swap space and 250GB RAID5 for the initial VMs with the rest left available to use as a volume served by FreeNAS as a TimeMachine store for our office laptops.

Read the rest of this entry »

So the parts to our ESX4i server have been dribbling in with the last piece to arrive being the Intel SR1600UR chassis which we had to get special ordered.

Putting the bits together was easy and we just needed to follow the instructions that came with SR1600. We were worried that we would be short of cables, thermal paste, riser cards, screws and accessories but the Intel chassis came with everything we needed. It may be ugly but it’s well thought out.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve been running VMWare Server 2.0 on top of a CentOS box for a while now but it could not really cope, especially as we are limited to 32bit CentOS for other application reasons which always meant upgrading the hardware was mostly pointless.

This finally got to breaking point over the summer so we started planning an upgrade. The release of ESX4i as a free version was a deciding factor although we did evaluate both VirtualBox and XenServer. The biggest problem in leaving the Linux based VMWare Server to a bare metal hypervisor is that you don’t have the luxury of broad hardware support.

Read the rest of this entry »