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

My ramblings on the stuff that holds it all together

Daily Archives: February 24, 2010

Installing ESXi on a Laptop

1 Comment Posted by on February 24, 2010

 

Following on from my recent blog posts about the various ways to configure ML115 G5 servers to run ESX, I thought I would do some further experimenting on some older hardware that I have.

I have a Dell D620 laptop with dual-core CPU and 4Gb of RAM which is now no longer my day-day machine, because of the success I had with SSD drives I installed a 64Gb SSD in this machine

I followed these instructions to install ESXi 4 Update 1 to a USB Lego brick flash drive (freebie from EMC a while ago and plays nicely to my Legogeekdom). I can then boot my laptop from this USB flash drive to run ESXi.

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I am surprised to say it worked 1st time, booted fully and even supports the on-board NIC!

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So, there you go – another low-cost ESXi server for your home lab that even comes with its own hot-swappable built-in battery UPS 🙂

The on-board SATA disk controller was also detected out of the box

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A quick look on eBay and D620’s are going for about £250, handy!

Here is a screenshot of the laptop running a nested copy of ESXi, interestingly I also told the VM it had 8Gb of RAM, when it only has 4Gb of physical RAM.

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Cheap ESX PC, ESX, ESX under ESX, ESXi, laptop, vSphere

The Big Cloud Debate @CloudCamp London

4 Comments Posted by on February 24, 2010

 

I noted with interest that the next CloudCamp London has been announced for Thursday 11th March, the last couple that I attended were pretty similar and other than some useful networking there was nothing really new/different that jumped out at me; so I wasn’t sure I would go to the next one as it seemed to have run out of steam a little until I noticed this on the agenda for March;

"The Big Cloud Debate " : A presidential style 4 way debate pitching 4 divergent views and approaches to cloud computing against each other. The speakers are:

  • Matt Deacon – Microsoft
  • Simon Wardley – Canonical
  • Rod Johnston – VMware
  • Chris Richardson Thoughtworks

The reason this is of interest to me? Rod Johnston came to VMware via the Springsource acquisition, I assume Matt Deacon will be discussing Microsoft’s Azure platform. plus CloudCamp London mainstay Simon Wardley from Cannonical I assume taking the EC2/Ubuntu angle and Chris Richardson (who I think has this blog; ex-springsource?

Should be an interesting debate, I think it would also be good to have a similar format debate with this panel (or the companies they represent) around the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) / private vs. public cloud angle – CloudCamp always has a software focus, but I think the cloud infrastructure debate has a lot of scope and a good potential audience

Registration doesn’t seem to be open to the general public yet, but I’m sure it will soon – maybe see you there.

CloudCamp