My home ESXi test environment
Jan 9, 2010 Server Virtualization, Technology
As an earlier post of mine stated I was looking into setting up an ESXi test environment. I previously have been running a custom installation of Ubuntu Hardy with VMware Server 1.0.5 on it. Even though that system has been running very reliable for the past year I wanted more. At my day job we have 2 ESX servers that run most of our infrastructure along with a few older servers that have not been moved virtual yet. I wanted to have a similar interface at home as we do at work so that is the reason for setting up this ESXi test environment. Below I will outline what hardware I am running on, special configurations for the machine and what I think so far after running it for a little over a week. Read the rest of this entry »
3ware 9650SE-4LPML RAID array Degraded
Nov 20, 2009 Server Virtualization, Technology
This week I have started to look into converting my home Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) x64 VMware Server 1.0.5 server to ESXi. The main reason behind this is that my work runs ESX 3.5 and I am trying to learn a bit more items related to ESX. Before I fully wiped all of my system I wanted to make sure that ESXi would run on my hardware, so I removed my 9650 card as well as the SATA connection to my main boot drive. This way I could revert back to my old system without loosing anything if ESXi would not run. The motherboard I have in the system is a MSI K9A2 Platinum AM2+/AM2 AMD 790FX ATX board which can boot from USB. I have picked up an 8GB USB flash drive to run ESXi on instead of a hard drive. After a lot of tweaking ESXi was running smooth on my system without my RAID drives and it was time to boot back into my original system to get some files and configurations off. During the system boot I was notified that the RAID array has been degraded and that there was a problem. Below I will show you the trouble shooting steps I used to get the RAID array back online and rebuilt. Read the rest of this entry »
