So I’ve been pretty busy lately. My company adopted ESX 3.0.1 Enterprise last year as part of a massive IT refresh project.

I joined the company in May ‘06, my boss had been there a few months, and the CTO had been there about a year. Neither of them are still with the company and as the network administrator, the ESX infrastructure has fallen into my hands - as my boss had more or less taken the lion’s share of responsibility and planning during the procurement and configuration phases. I’m quite familiar with the day to day tasks of deploying a VM, etc… But the bigger picture has been a little fuzzy.

My new boss and the new CTO have been pretty great to work with; and supported my desire to attend VMWare sponsored training on ESX this past week downtown at the MicroTek facility on Broad Street in the Financial District.

The training was pretty good. Each student (there were about fifteen or twenty) had their own pc, and we used Citrix to access VMWare’s educational environment where teams of two shared one remote ESX server (DL380). When we got to the Clustering/VMotion/HA part we combined into teams of four with two students managing each ESX host. We covered everything from installing to troubleshooting. Quite a bit of material for four eight hour days. The tough thing is that truly understanding everything about ESX means you already have a grasp of Windows administration, Active Directory, SAN architectures, networking, etc… So for instance, if you’ve never touched a SAN, the whole concept of VMotion or presenting LUNS to a host isn’t going to make much sense - neither are iSCSI software vs hardware based initiators, or HBA’s, vLans, etc, etc… The weakest link for me is understanding our SAN architecture. I’m getting a handle on it; and we are hoping to get Dell in to give us a technical overview of managing it, creating and presenting LUNS to hosts. We’ve got two additional matching Dell 2950’s we want to add to the existing two ESX hosts. We need additional licenses for the ports on the fiber switch. Once the proper LUNS have been made available to the new hosts I’ll be able to set them up into the existing cluster with no problem.

I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with the free version of VMWare Server at home. This has been alot of fun. We had a very simple network at home, cable internet, a wi-fi cable/dsl router, and that was it. I built an internal LAN and made the wi-fi LAN a DMZ that is isolated from our internal LAN. My vpn device is simply an old Dell Dimension T500 with some extra RAM and dual NICs, running Win2K3 server and RRAS… on the inside sits my workstation, my wife’s workstation, and my single server/dc running Win2k3. This is an old AMD Athlon 1.2 GHz maxed out with 1.5 GB of RAM.

I bought an old Compaq SDLT drive on EBay for $165, put a SCSI card in and installed backup software. I installed VMWare server for Windows and put two VMWare guests (two Windows XP workstations and a Linux workstation) and was running my server/dc/dns and backup on the host. It kept occurring to me that maybe there was a better way to do this - so I cloned the server to a VM, installed Ubuntu Linux server with minimal options, installed VMWare server for Linux, and then ran my guests, plus the original server in VM’s on the Linux host.

I was able to map the SCSI interface and tape drive through to the VM guest server. Everything worked ok, but for some reason I could not get the same performance out of this arrangement that I had gotten out of the Windows based host which totally suprised me. Even disabling the server and trying various combinations of RAM and reservations for the host, there just didn’t seem to be enough CPU cycles to go around and everything ran at a snail’s pace. When I went back to Windows again, everything just seemed to work better. This was a disappointment because managing the Linux server felt so much more like managing an ESX environment. Its also really cool to use a tool like Putty to go in and some basic sysadmin stuff instead of waiting for an RDP session, open multiple windows, waiting, clicking, waiting, etc, etc, etc…

My wife’s workstation is actually an old Compaq notebook that was originally NT 4, upgraded to 2000 Pro. Its been acting a little funky lately, but she has all our banking software on it and some other stuff. (yes, we back it up). So I made a VM out of it, thus taking any hardware issues completely out of the picture. I was able to give the VM a lot more free disk space, and upgrade it to XP. So now my wife can use the VM instead of the notebook which has more resources and isn’t dependent on an old piece of hardware, slow drive and memory, etc… Such a powerful tool.

Maybe I’ll see if my wife will let me pick up some supported hardware off EBay to build an ESX server at home