VMware Server 2.0 setup

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The Project.

So purchased the parts I need to build my new VMware box. Clockwise from top left they are:

2 x Hitachi Deskstar 500GB drives (one for OS, one for virtual machines)
8GB DDR2C4 (Geil Black Dragon)
Intel Q6600 with Freezer Pro 7
Win XP Pro 64bit OEM
Corsair 520W PSU
Asus P5K-E



The donor box is currently running a Barton core AthlonXP 3200 on an Asus A7-8NX Deluxe (rev2) mainboard with 1GB of DDR and is running WinXP (32bit) SP2 so hopefully it’s going to see quite an increase in performance when it’s finished - just what we need to run multiple VM’s.

Here's the box with the new hardware installed...still some cable tidying to do but mostly finished - I need some more velcro!



Also grabbed a 3.5” floppy drive so I can Ghost the machine (I loathe System Restore, it’s one of the first things that gets turned off after the OS is installed) I was using a Boot disc to Ghost my other machines but it seems that the RAM disk driver in the Linux boot shell doesn’t like more than 2GB of physical memory. Easily fixed with a Ghost DOS floppy built from a retail copy of Ghost 2003. While I was feeling industrious I updated the Ghost executable doing this procedure Ghost Update: to ensure we've got the latest NTFS and SATA drivers.

But I digress. Here’s the Infrastructure view of the Lab. It's definitely a work in progress but so far we've got two DC's, one member server running RRAS and DHCP relay, two XP clients. DHCP Scopes tested across RRAS are working. All this is for 70-291 which I'm hoping to get done by year end.



Phew, now on to chapter 3 in MCSE press book - Implementing Name Resolution Using DNS

 

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Neat setup!

Up until I got Esxed up at home I ran VMWare server 2.0 on a similar box (beefy desktop, 8Gb RAM, 64bit Server 2003). It handled pretty much everything most of my test VMs threw at it - ran up to twelve at once without a problem.

One of the things you need to bear in mind is that VMWare Server 2.0 is still beta. This bit me on the arse when I hadn't used it for a while, powered it on and ran Windows Updates on the box - only to subsequently power it up and find that none of the VMs would power on - giving an extremely unhelpful error message (see this post for details.

Moral of this story is that you need to pay close attention to beta expiry, patches and new releases

 

Nice rig there!

Had to comment, that system is almost identical to my main system, down to the exact motherboard model and case. Pretty freaky, either that, or we both just have very good taste.

 

looking good mate...esp like that 8 gigs of RAM

Any reason why you didnt put esxi straight onto it though? Is it your main box used for something else?

Jiggy

 

Pretty cool setup, I am actually in the middle of setting up vmware server 2.0 my self. I will however need to buy much more memory as I seem to be hitting 50% with just 3 vm's.

 

I setup VMware Server 2, on my machine at work. Surprisingly works very well with the web interface / remote console over VPN from home. In Linux and Windows I had no problems with the virtual console at all unlike the beta where it crashed constantly, thumbs up VMware.

This is on a Intel quad core with 4GB Ram running Vista64 host at work and ADSL2+ at home though YMMV