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Showing posts from March, 2012

Further experiences with Virtualization - VMware ESXi and Oracle Virtualization

So continuing in the vein of trying out these virtualization options in the marketplace I looked into the big gun - VMware to see how that would go on my cheapernetwork. Alas, my attempts were doomed to fail. The initial installation of ESXi failed - it was unable to detect the hard disk drives in my HP virtual servers. It was a bit of a WTF moment - that a fairly easily available mainboard, with no special interfaces or anything like that. The disks were fairly standard SATA disks - Seagate drives both. 160GB so not small and not unusually large. At any rate, after trying different disks, going to the console prompt and looking there I gave up. dmesg didn't even detect the /dev/sd i  disks at all and the more I investigated the more I found that there were some hardware limitations. Given I have limited time, I abandoned my VMware attempts and instead looked into Oracle's Virtualization offerings. The first thing that struck me was the sheer size of the downloads for the com

Experiences with Virtualisation - XenServer

I have been experimenting with different virtualisation technologies lately. At work I already run a Microsoft Hyper-V server with two Ubuntu servers running on it. One is an OTRS (ticketing system) server and the other an FTP / DNS server. This server is a 1RU rackmount box with no virtualisation supported on the hardware. Oh well... it still runs reasonably well, however, I've found that under high disk / network load, the virtual machines grind to an absolute halt and I have to reset them. So I've begun expanding my horizons. Recently I searched for and found some small form factor desktops with support for virtualisation - namely: HP Compaq dc5750 Small Form Factor Black AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual Core Processor 3800+ Dua. I bought two (for the princely sum of $9 each plus postage so $130 (!) delivered) - they came with 1GB of RAM and 80GB HDD. I've upgraded the RAM in both to 4GB and I've got more on order. I also turfed the disk drives - one had a dodgy sector an