Thursday, January 20, 2011
HP Microserver & VMWare vSphere
A last I have a little time to sit down and have a play!
Bought two HP Microservers since they were soooo cheap with the £100 cashback of late. By FAR the best source of information on these was TechHead, just a goldmine of information on there!
Plan was to keep one (Machine 1) at a relatively low specification so I could leave it on and just stick a Domain Controller and a few other things on there that were not going to tax the hardware too heavily. So for this first one I just pulled the pointless (!!) 1GB out and put in 2 x 4GB which I sourced from OrcaLogic, left the 160GB that came with the machine in there and took the 160GB drive out of the other machine.
I wanted the second machine (Machine 2) to a have a little more oomph so again I added 2 x 4GB from OrcaLogic but this time I gave it a little more horsepower on the storage front! Following advice from a TechHead article I went ahead and bought an Adaptec 2405 because the cable that usually goes into the motherboard is pretty short and this card has the appropriate socket sticking out of the back of the card, result! Decided to go for a RAID 10 setup, I had a couple of newish 500GB drives which I'd sourced from Overclockers a little while ago so in these went! Then temptation got the better of me and I decided to try and make use of the Hybrid RAID functionality on the 2405 so picked up a couple of OCZ Vertex 2(E!)'s from Scan. There was a little confusion here in that when the drives arrived they are not "branded" as 2E's, after some communication with Scan and some research myself it does indeed seem that they are 2E's, part number is OCZSSD2-2VTXE120G.
Hooked both machines up to my Gigabit network and all seems to be well!
The whole point of this was to be able to get a VMWare vSphere lab up and running to support my studies, particularly the WCF and WWF side of things in .NET 4. I installed ESXi on to a couple of USB sticks (very easy!) and pushed them into the internal USB socket on the motherboard, switched on all booted up OK, honestly, it couldn't be much more straightforward. Initially I put the vSphere client on my laptop and managed it that way.....yesterday I took the plunge and installed vCenter Server on a VM (!!) which again was a no brainer. Had one minor issue where the Tomcat server failed to start, turned out to be that a path to one of the Java DLL's had two backslashes in it, changed that and all seems well!
Have been spending the last few days getting the required VM's up and running, so far we have...
Machine 1
Primary Domain Controller
VMWare vCenter Server
TFS 2010 (Basic install with no build server, yet!)
Machine 2
SQL Server 2008 Standard
Web Server 1 (Load Balanced)
Web Server 2 (Load Balanced)
Literally just got the last of these going this morning so now time to get down and actually do some work and study! :)
I'm not sure about the performance of this setup yet but for me this is not the overriding factor.....for me I need to be able to create VM's on a whim and I can certainly do that and secondly I needed the machines to pretty easy on the power front and these certainly are.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, they needed to be quiet, I work/study lots from a little office with all the kit right next to me and whilst something with a bit more beans was easily attainable on a similar budget it would almost be certainly be louder and I value a bit of peace and quiet....
All I have to do now is save up for a VMWare vSphere license so when I get to the end of my eval I'm not left high and dry:)
Bought two HP Microservers since they were soooo cheap with the £100 cashback of late. By FAR the best source of information on these was TechHead, just a goldmine of information on there!
Plan was to keep one (Machine 1) at a relatively low specification so I could leave it on and just stick a Domain Controller and a few other things on there that were not going to tax the hardware too heavily. So for this first one I just pulled the pointless (!!) 1GB out and put in 2 x 4GB which I sourced from OrcaLogic, left the 160GB that came with the machine in there and took the 160GB drive out of the other machine.
I wanted the second machine (Machine 2) to a have a little more oomph so again I added 2 x 4GB from OrcaLogic but this time I gave it a little more horsepower on the storage front! Following advice from a TechHead article I went ahead and bought an Adaptec 2405 because the cable that usually goes into the motherboard is pretty short and this card has the appropriate socket sticking out of the back of the card, result! Decided to go for a RAID 10 setup, I had a couple of newish 500GB drives which I'd sourced from Overclockers a little while ago so in these went! Then temptation got the better of me and I decided to try and make use of the Hybrid RAID functionality on the 2405 so picked up a couple of OCZ Vertex 2(E!)'s from Scan. There was a little confusion here in that when the drives arrived they are not "branded" as 2E's, after some communication with Scan and some research myself it does indeed seem that they are 2E's, part number is OCZSSD2-2VTXE120G.
Hooked both machines up to my Gigabit network and all seems to be well!
The whole point of this was to be able to get a VMWare vSphere lab up and running to support my studies, particularly the WCF and WWF side of things in .NET 4. I installed ESXi on to a couple of USB sticks (very easy!) and pushed them into the internal USB socket on the motherboard, switched on all booted up OK, honestly, it couldn't be much more straightforward. Initially I put the vSphere client on my laptop and managed it that way.....yesterday I took the plunge and installed vCenter Server on a VM (!!) which again was a no brainer. Had one minor issue where the Tomcat server failed to start, turned out to be that a path to one of the Java DLL's had two backslashes in it, changed that and all seems well!
Have been spending the last few days getting the required VM's up and running, so far we have...
Machine 1
Primary Domain Controller
VMWare vCenter Server
TFS 2010 (Basic install with no build server, yet!)
Machine 2
SQL Server 2008 Standard
Web Server 1 (Load Balanced)
Web Server 2 (Load Balanced)
Literally just got the last of these going this morning so now time to get down and actually do some work and study! :)
I'm not sure about the performance of this setup yet but for me this is not the overriding factor.....for me I need to be able to create VM's on a whim and I can certainly do that and secondly I needed the machines to pretty easy on the power front and these certainly are.
Lastly, and probably most importantly, they needed to be quiet, I work/study lots from a little office with all the kit right next to me and whilst something with a bit more beans was easily attainable on a similar budget it would almost be certainly be louder and I value a bit of peace and quiet....
All I have to do now is save up for a VMWare vSphere license so when I get to the end of my eval I'm not left high and dry:)
