Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

As eric and some people here and here very helpfully pointed out last week the HP Compaq D530 desktop PC has hardware that is compatible with ESX 3.5’s new SATA drivers.

I managed to get a 2.8GHz HT one from eBay with 4Gb RAM and a 500Gb SATA disk for approx £315 GBP delivered, including VAT.

And I’m pleased to report ESX installed 1st time straight from the CD, no fiddling required, this is very handy as until about 6 months ago I had a Compaq ML570 G1 (4x 700 MHz Xeon CPU and 12Gb RAM plus external disk shelf) which was fine until my electricity supplier caught up with the fact they had been seriously under-billing me for my electricity consumption, so the rather large bill for running it for a year led to it’s powering down for a majority of the time.

I’m in the process of migrating all my home VM’s from VMWare Server (I used to run Windows as the actual host OS) to ESX 3.5.. don’t have a “proper” licence yet, but I will do at some point before the eval times out, with the power saving it will more than pay for itself!

Whilst this is lowly desktop PC hardware it uses about 1/8th of the power of the ML570 and performance is probably on-par.. although slower disks (I previously had 14 x 18Gb U3 SCSI for my VM volumes)

Will post more results when I’ve finished, seriously considering picking up another one and enabling vMotion; I’ve used OpenFiler in the past to get a reasonable iSCSI “SAN” up and running – although I suspect my very old Cisco 10/100 hub is going to need replacing next!

Why? you might ask – well, because I can and my Garage has rack-space 😉 I’ve always had a decent sized home network, maybe I’ll blog about what I run at home later and it’s always handy to “eat your own dogfood”  – I work with this stuff, so it’s useful to use it myself and have something I can rip apart/trash as required without having to buy expensive hardware or fill out lots of change-control forms!

I like this idea of this. it sounds like a product for automating a lot of what I blogged about in my Build a better test lab series (much delayed in publishing… must find some time to post further!).

We had a lot of trouble with the out of the box p2v tools; would be great if they could deliver this, I’ve asked to join the beta via our partner manager – fingers crossed!