My new project...

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Dude are you being serious?, your electricity bill is £500 per month..

 

Ummm... not enitrely no...

That was sarcasm at the fact that my bills have gone up about 40% in the past four months. In reality its more like about £100 pm - whereas it used to be about £65 pm.

Actually, the other day, I worked out how many days I have to work before I pay off all my outgoings (mortgage, bills, phone, travel, bb etc) each month. Surprised myself at how little it actually was - then promptly realised I spend waaaay too much money on ****e every day

 

im loving this thread.. educational and entertainment at once!

 

All finished now, bar the shouting!

The install of VirtualCenter gave me ballache, to be frank, and in the end I couldn't get the VMWare Converter or Patch Updater working - kept complaining about the ODBC connection. Couldn't be arsed to spend hours trying to fix it, so just installed without them. Cluster now up and running - last thing to do is get a VMotion NIC assigned in each host and it'll be finished... for now Next on the agenda is an openfiler iSCSI box - but that'll have to wait until I've got a bit more dough.

Just had a quality blast from the past - I decided to take this opportunity to update all my gold builds and, whilst building my XP Pro one I came across this little beauty:



I remember once working somewhere where a guy with four MCPs to his name didn't know how to resolve that error. Aaaaah - memories.

 

congrats on getting most of it up and running

nuts...

HP ProLiant ML110 G5 - Dual-Core Xeon 3065 2.33 GHz - 455948-035 : £149.97

hopefully at the end of october the price will go back down *false hope *

I was thinking of setting up esxi and openfiler (for esxi and junk) after i have finished the 70-290 at the end of october as break before the 70-291 and i could also set up a virtual lab for the latter.

 

hey zeb, if your short on cash for your openfiler box just make a virtual one...works a treat

The rest of your setup is looking mint. I keep my stuff running in the lounge 24/7 and have a very understanding wife. A man cave is definitely on the cards in the next place that we live.

I hear what you are saying about the power prices going up...ouch, but heck, you gotta spend your coin on something right.

Happy trails

Jiggy.

 

Hey Zeb, the setup looks crazy. I got a question, how loud are the servers? the thing is I don't have any room in the living for computers and I was hoping to set something up like one or two ML110 G5 max in my room.

 

Found this entry about someone setting up their esxi environment with FreeNAS.

http://www.weckstrom.com/ESXi on the cheap.htm

 

Well - its finally all up and running. I spent the best part of a day trying to fix issues with Update Manager in Virtual Center but, in the end, just decided to reinstall VC with a brand new DB. I also took the opportunity to rebuild the ESX hosts because I wanted to reallocate one of the RAID controllers I bought to an OpenFiler box for shared storage.

I had some fun and games along the way, so if anyone is interested, you need to make sure of the following:

1 - Make sure you give the correct permissions to the account you use to create the VirtualCenter DB. if using SQL Server 2005 (like I did) you'll need to temporarily assign the account the 'sysadmin' role on both the VC database and the MSDB database (the latter so that it can create the necessary jobs)

2 - If you're reinstalling, as well as deleting the old DB, make sure you delete the old jobs created by the earlier database - I didn't do this and got an error when creating the db schema via the VC install - quickly resolved by deleting them then stepping back through the installer

3 - Take good care to note the recovery model for your installation. The VC install points out that, if you are using the 'full' model, of course you need to be aware that transaction logs will fill up your disks if backups are not taken. This is a 'duh' for most people, but stuipdly I hadn't bothered to change the model when i first installed, so this could have bitten me on the arse later on. Set it to 'simple' on both unless you plan to do regular t-log backups. Of course, you'll also need to ensure that VC DB is backed up regularly anyway!

4 - This is the big one that caused me the most pain. Make SURE you use correct case when installing your hosts. Without this, HA will NOT work. You'll get an error moaning about this when you try to enable it. Somehow I had managed to end up with ONE entry in ONE config file that was different for ONE of my hosts (upper case when it should have been lower) and, as a result, had to grep through config files on each of the hosts looking for it. I finally tracked it down, edited it in Vi, disabled HA, bounced both hosts and re-enabled HA - everything worked perfectly from that point on. I also found a neat tip about adding the fqdn & hostname of each host into the hosts file on all servers in your cluster to speed up HA.

Next up this week is P2Ving my old Exchange box (with its forty-odd Gb worth of deliberately-collected spam) and one of my DCs. provided that goes without a hitch, everything else is going over next weekend (DNS, DHCP, File & Print, SQL, network monitoring, AV and WUS) - hopefully leaving me with just five boxes instead of my current twelve. next month I'm adding another host, then I'm going to ask work whether they want my basement to be a new DR site...

 

Thanks for sharing Zeb, must have been challenging as well as fun?

 

Cheers - a bit challenging, but I learned a bit more into the bargain so its all good. Nothing like having a home environment that is similar to your work one to give you a bit of practice. Next thing I'm looking at is getting a backup solution in place for it all - probably going to stick with VRanger cos thats what we use at work, but I may try out a couple of others cos VRanger is, frankly, pants.

What's really challenging at the moment is this b***ard cold I've picked up from somewhere - haven't stopped sneezing all ****ing day and its driving me insane.

 

We got an ml115 in our datacentre just running some little bit of software, didnt want to blow much money just for one app, they seem to do the trick quite nicely. In fact I was considering getting myself one, with much the same idea to virtualise a few servers for studying.

 

Zeb,

How are you getting on with your lab, have you found any snags that we could do with knowing. how much ram have you stuck in the 115's how many vm's are they running. I WANT INFO!!!