I've been a VMware server user for about a year with a production server running a hosted Exchange server, a Windows 2003 Web edition server, a Win 2003 SBS machine and two XP workstations in a production environment (Win2003 x64 host). I just set ESXi up on a 2005 era SuperMicro 5014c-t 1u server with a pair of hard drives (both SATA). The boot drive is 80GB (total overkill) and the data drive is 500GB. I'm happily running two VMs (Untangle 5.3 and XP Pro 32bit) and both work great with 512MB each allocated. The server has a P4 3Ghz and currently 2GB of PC2-5300 ram (soon to be doubled to the motherboard max).
I've never done iSCSI, and see no reason at his stage of the game to go there. I might try mounting NFS (couldn't get it working on my NAS drive, but I hear Windows servers do it nicely). For my clients (small 5-25 client businesses), I think consolidating 5-10 servers on a DL360 or an ML350 with 16GB of RAM would run perfectly. I could retire a lot of iron with this product and never lay eyes in iSCSI. I guess I could also set up an inexpensive Windows Storage server. I hear they can do both NAS and SAN with the proper software.
Bottom line - any box with an Intel SCSI controller will likely work. Use an old 40GB drive for the OS and as big a drive as you can dig up for the data. The footprint is small, so it's likely you'll get three or four workstations, or possibly two servers up and running nicely.
BTW, I tried attaching a USB drive. It saw it, but didn't offer it to me as a data store option.
Slashdot Mirror
Go to the VMWare infrastructure client and set the system date to 8/1/08. Make sure you disable NTP at the same time!
I guess you could rely on third-party apps that sync it locally...
I've been a VMware server user for about a year with a production server running a hosted Exchange server, a Windows 2003 Web edition server, a Win 2003 SBS machine and two XP workstations in a production environment (Win2003 x64 host). I just set ESXi up on a 2005 era SuperMicro 5014c-t 1u server with a pair of hard drives (both SATA). The boot drive is 80GB (total overkill) and the data drive is 500GB. I'm happily running two VMs (Untangle 5.3 and XP Pro 32bit) and both work great with 512MB each allocated. The server has a P4 3Ghz and currently 2GB of PC2-5300 ram (soon to be doubled to the motherboard max). I've never done iSCSI, and see no reason at his stage of the game to go there. I might try mounting NFS (couldn't get it working on my NAS drive, but I hear Windows servers do it nicely). For my clients (small 5-25 client businesses), I think consolidating 5-10 servers on a DL360 or an ML350 with 16GB of RAM would run perfectly. I could retire a lot of iron with this product and never lay eyes in iSCSI. I guess I could also set up an inexpensive Windows Storage server. I hear they can do both NAS and SAN with the proper software. Bottom line - any box with an Intel SCSI controller will likely work. Use an old 40GB drive for the OS and as big a drive as you can dig up for the data. The footprint is small, so it's likely you'll get three or four workstations, or possibly two servers up and running nicely. BTW, I tried attaching a USB drive. It saw it, but didn't offer it to me as a data store option.