ESXi day one.

So, since I’m a total hardware monger and VMWare just released the ESXi hypervisor for free, I thought I might give it a shot. This was two days ago. I have two boxes at the moment that were just sitting around, a SuperMicro 1U server with a P4 1.8 (yawn) and an HP Pavilion desktop with a dual core P4 in it. So, I gave the SuperMicro a shot. Apparently, to my dismay, the SuperMicro had ACPI problems, and ESXi barfed during the install. After that, I tried to install it on the HP, with more success. The only problem was that ESXi is very limited as to what kinds of network cards it will support (probably because engineers are lazy and don’t like to port kernel modules to VMKernel, or because ESXi wasn’t meant for a hobbyist market). I tried a Realtek 8139, 3Com 595C-TX, SMC, Via Rhine III, and a D-Link before I decided to drop into the tech support console and rummage through ESXi’s dirty laundry. Apparently, instead of the service console, they have a stripped down BusyBox console. Which is fine, I guess. I like the RedHat SC, but people have to have some reason to upgrade to ESX Full aside from VMotion and DRS. Poking around under /mod, I found that there were only a handful of mostly on board NICs supported (same driver names as linux… thats… coincidental.). One I did find on there was an e100, which I knew I had lying around somewhere. I finally braved the horrors of The Closet and found one buried next to an old DEC 10/100 NIC. Awesome. Installed, rescanned the Management Network, and away I went.

Now, when I say this isn’t a hobbyists virtualization HV, I mean it. It has decent performance I guess for the particular hardware (it is a desktop, afterall), and I’m mounting my VM store off of NFS, so thats going to slow it down a tad. Not to mention, that e100 has been around since before the world was created, so network performance is going to suffer a bit.

All in all, I like it. Its not Xen (it doesn’t have the speed), but I guess it makes up for it with the Virtual Infrastructure Client. Eventually, I may try it on some enterprise class hardware. If I can ever find any OTC.

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