Back in 2000 I managed to acquire several retired systems to bring to Uni: this included 4-5 cheap P120 machines. At the time, I thought this was great; I had an OpenBSD box as my gateway, a FreeBSD box, a few Linux boxes, and likely something else that doesn’t even exist now. The school has a superfast connection, unlimited bandwidth, and I was curious. Although I didn’t really have time, I still managed to install and have all these servers running from my room.

I like ESX. I like Linux. It is absurdly easy to configure Linux as an NFS server and mount it in ESXIi). Installed NFS I currently use Ubuntu Server for my home lab, but the process is basically the same for Red Hat and derivatives. sudo apt-get install nfs-common sudo apt-get install nfs-kernel-server Next, configure NFS so it can server your local LAN. Normally you would list only specific servers, but, well, we’re being cheap and dirty today. Open /etc/exports in VI or your editor of choice.

I’m not impressed too often with much software, especially the closed source kind. I find a leaning preference to all things FOSS. If I had a million dollars, I’d likely spend all day contributing to all the projects I wish I had time to contribute to. Regardless, there are a select few closed-source products that I believe are truly excellent. I mean, the type of software where you aren’t asking “I wish this could do this” and start asking “I wonder what else this can do.”

My little server doesn’t have a cdrom, but I didn’t want to actually run ESX from a USB (i.e. esx-on-a-stick). Here are my notes of configuring a flash disk to boot the ESX installer (so you can install it onto a local disk). For this demo, my USB is /dev/sdb Install the syslinux utils to your computer (apt-get install syslinux mboot) Install the MBR sudo install-mbr /dev/sdb Copy all the files from the ISO to your fat32 formated partition Install syslinux sudo syslinux /dev/sdb1 Move isolinux.cfg to syslinux.cfg, and try booting. If it doesn’t work, edit syslinux.cfg says something like: default menu.c32 menu title ESXi Boot timeout 100 label ESXi menu label Boot VMware ESXi kernel mboot.c32 …

I recently had the need to move a rather large (450GB) VMDK file from an external hard drive into ESXi. Since ESXi doesn’t support external hard drives, this makes things quite a bit more difficult. At first I tried using SCP to copy the file over (after enabling SSH access for ESXi). However, when I tried to do this the time left was almost 20 hours – a tad too long!

I now have successful installation of VMware Server 2 (Beta RC1) on top of Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit. I have been using various virtualization technologies for years, and VMware is usually the easiest to install and configure. So far, VMware Server 2 RC1, has proven to be the exception to the rule. That said, I am very excited by the direction VMware is taking – this new server version looks to have great potential.