Recently one of my servers at home died. It is a big pain when something that you rely on is suddenly gone. Well, I had two options; one to buy the parts I think I need to fix the server though do not really know if that will do the job, two purchase a different server.
Right now money is a little tight so I have been putting this decision off though things have been starting to get a little difficult in trying to access files that I need and having our desktop computers talk to each other and such. So I started looking around ebay and craig's list and I put together a list of potentials. Based upon features and I will admit company trust I purchased a slightly used HP DL145 G2 server. It has Two dual core opteron 2.2 ghz processors, 4 gb of memory and 1 tb of disk space. It only took 3 days for it to gether here. In fact it arrived this afternoon. Needless to say my I was a bit excited (I know I am a nerd).
Well, one of the decisions that I made when purchasing this server was that I would consolidate the two servers that I have (one working and the other not working) into one server using virtualization. I am a bit of a novice when it comes to this technology though we use it quite a bit at work. Since we use VMWare ESX as work I was leaning towards that solution though I hear XenServer is also very good (MS HyperVisor is still too new for me to want to deal with it). So after work today I downloaded ESXi 4, burned it to a disk and off I went.
After a couple of hours of frustration on why I could not get the thing working I started doing some research and playing around (I am not one to call it quites, I have to know why it was not working). Anyway, I came to find out that the server I bought is not on the hardware compatibility list for VMWare. If I had know that in the first place I probably would have selected a different server, though since I do not do my due dilligence I am stuck with either figuring out how to make it work or giving up and trying another solution.
As I mentioned before, I am not one for giving up. I came to find out that the reason why ESXi does not like this server is due to the SCSI/SATA card that the two drives are plugged into by default. For those not familiar with this model it has a small back plane in the middle of the server that has a riser card plugged into it that supports PCI-X cards. One of the two slots contains a SATA 300 TX4 card which has a cable that plugs into the SCSI port on the mother board. ESXi does not work with drives that are connected to the server via a port or the backplane (at least that is my understanding and it is accurate in the case of this server). At this point in time all that I had mentioned was just an assumption. I needed a way to test it out and see if there was a way around it. We in looking at the mother board I found that it has two SATA ports on the board that the drives can plug into and bypass the backplane all together. Now I am not that familiar with all the features and functionality of this server yes so I am not sure yet if this is a good idea or not though I needed to test out a theory. Needless to say my assumption turned out to be correct. As soon as I changed the ports for those drives everything was working fabulously. I was able to boot up to the instance and I must say that I was a little disapointed. The interface has a lot to be desired. Say what you want about Microsoft but its interfaces are pretty funcitonal even though there may be some performance or security issues.
After configuring the VERY few options on the server I then flipped over to my desktop and browsed to the server (actually I set up a DNS entry for the server first in AD so that I can use a URL instead of an IP address). I downloaded the vSphere Client application and installed it and it all went smoothly. I then opened the vSphere Host Update Utility 4 (might as well make sure that everything is up-to-date). I was informed that there were some patches available, I downloaded them and installed them as easy as can be. After all my initial issues it almost seems to easy. I keep expecting something to go wrong, though so far so good. After the patches were applied the utility rebooted the ESXi server and everything came back up without any issues. I am still feeling like there is some impending doom awaiting me, maybe it is just the cynical IT guy always expecting the worst.
Next I opened the vSphere client application, logged onto the server and no errors or issues. The interface is nice and clean. Not a lot of clutter on it which is something that I like. So far so good. Currently it is 11:30 pm in the evening and even though I want to stay up and be nerdy I need to get some sleep. I will begin my foray into the world of creating vertual machines on the VM Server Tomorrow.
Good Night.
Day 2
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