41 replies to this topic

[ikon]

It's not. The strange thing is that I have had two different issues in the past 48 hours on my EX485. One was a red hardware error and then suddenly green. Then this morning I could not connect to the console nor to any folders. Server responded to a ping, but not RDP. After a hard power off, we were back in action.

Server logs said that the previous shutdown was unexpected. Interestingly enough, the time was hours before I pulled the plug. Looks like I couldn't have bought this at a better time.

Good luck with it.

[Joe_Miner]

It's not. The strange thing is that I have had two different issues in the past 48 hours on my EX485. One was a red hardware error and then suddenly green. Then this morning I could not connect to the console nor to any folders. Server responded to a ping, but not RDP. After a hard power off, we were back in action.

Server logs said that the previous shutdown was unexpected. Interestingly enough, the time was hours before I pulled the plug. Looks like I couldn't have bought this at a better time.

Sounds like your EX485 overheard you ordering a MicroServer and now it's PO'd -- You have to be careful what you say around your EX-4XX they're very sensitive you know!

Wishing you the best with your new build -- you're gona have fun!! (Till then be sure to talk nice to your EX-4xx -- maybe some cool filtered green power and relaxing Pandora will do the trick.)

[ikon]

Sounds like your EX485 overheard you ordering a MicroServer and now it's PO'd -- You have to be careful what you say around your EX-4XX they're very sensitive you know!

Wishing you the best with your new build -- you're gona have fun!! (Till then be sure to talk nice to your EX-4xx -- maybe some cool filtered green power and relaxing Pandora will do the trick.)

[jazzerjay]

Sounds like your EX485 overheard you ordering a MicroServer and now it's PO'd -- You have to be careful what you say around your EX-4XX they're very sensitive you know!

Wishing you the best with your new build -- you're gona have fun!! (Till then be sure to talk nice to your EX-4xx -- maybe some cool filtered green power and relaxing Pandora will do the trick.)

Now that's just funny right there. I think you're spot on about that. All this hype about this box and I've been too sick to work on it. What has happened to our world where a man cannot simply sit down and enjoy building a new server? Unfortunately I'm at work today and have much to do here as well. At least I have tonight.

[Joe_Miner]

Now that's just funny right there. I think you're spot on about that. All this hype about this box and I've been too sick to work on it. What has happened to our world where a man cannot simply sit down and enjoy building a new server? Unfortunately I'm at work today and have much to do here as well. At least I have tonight.

On the bright side you can be thinking of all the great times you and you MicroServer will be having

[jmwills]

A lot of times, it is better to back off for a bit and come back fresh.

[jazzerjay]

On the bright side you can be thinking of all the great times you and you MicroServer will be having

Joe, what drives are you going to use to test with and what OS will you try? (all of them...I know)

[Joe_Miner]

Joe, what drives are you going to use to test with and what OS will you try? (all of them...I know)

I'm planning to start out playing with a SSD for the OS and use the 250 that comes with for my VHD's till HD prices come down. I'm thinking of starting with 2008 R2 and see how that performs with Hyper-V. I have an old 750 (7200 RPM) that I may put in for data and a 2T green I could put in for backups.

Hopefully next weekend or the one after. Very short on time right now.

Further down the road I'd like to see about trying to load ESXi 5 via a flash on the MB.

I'm a real novice at this so it will be a learning experience

Edited by Joe_Miner, 06 February 2012 - 12:48 PM.

[jmwills]

ESXi on a thumb Drive works like a champ. I recently put a 90gig SSD in my Hyper-V server and that thing is just plain smokin'.

[jazzerjay]

I'll be doing the same I think. Starting with ESXi on a thumb drive as I don't have an SSD for testing. ESX testing will be very short as I'm not looking for functionality but more for gee whiz, I suppose. I own a licensed copy of WHS v1 and WHS 2011, so I'll be installing and comparing to see what best suits our environment/needs.

All of this might be moot since I'll probably install v1 on here and go back to reading. I often times don't want to keep "working" when I get home, so I forego testing as much as I'd like.

[jmwills]

I know that "keep on working from home" feeling. The biggest obstacle I see is getting a license for VCenter in order to be able to control all of the different elements. I wilbe experimenting with Open Filer in the coming days to see if I can successfuly present iSCSI target LUNS to either the Hyper-V clients or ESXi clients.

[Joe_Miner]

ESXi on a thumb Drive works like a champ. I recently put a 90gig SSD in my Hyper-V server and that thing is just plain smokin'.

Thanks -- I may be calling for advice in the future.

[jazzerjay]

I know that "keep on working from home" feeling. The biggest obstacle I see is getting a license for VCenter in order to be able to control all of the different elements. I wilbe experimenting with Open Filer in the coming days to see if I can successfuly present iSCSI target LUNS to either the Hyper-V clients or ESXi clients.

Sounds like a good idea.

[Joe_Miner]

...snip.... The biggest obstacle I see is getting a license for VCenter in order to be able to control all of the different elements. I wilbe experimenting with Open Filer in the coming days to see if I can successfuly present iSCSI target LUNS to either the Hyper-V clients or ESXi clients.

OK, I have no clue what you're talking about but it sounds like fun -- I'd love to hear more ---

[jazzerjay]

You already know that ESX is a hypervisor that runs on bare metal allowing you to house multiple operating systems on the same hardware. VCenter is an application that lives on a windows server (physical or virtual) or virtual appliance for version 5 that controls more functionality between ESX hosts. Among those are reporting, share storage between the hosts, distributed virtual switches and a ton of other features all rolled up into a pretty expensive little package including HA, DRS, vmotion and storage vmotion.. (expensive for me anyway, not for corporate) I believe there is a separate forum for this type of discussion, but you could start here at this link. http://www.vmware.co...s/features.html

@jmwillis, this is my "work at work".

[jmwills]

It used to be mine until I pigeoned holded myself with Share Point and SQL.....so, the VCenter is not really needed? All I really wanted to do was run ESXi from the thumb drive and have a data store used by one 1 TB drive for all the VM's and present some sort of SAN Storage to those VM's, which looks like OpenFiler may be the best option. This would allow SAN storage to be seen by those VM's thru an iSCSI target.

VMotion....I understand the principle but I don't need that at home. HyperV can be installed as bare metal also but I am more familiar with ESXi for that.

[jazzerjay]

VMotion....I understand the principle but I don't need that at home. HyperV can be installed as bare metal also but I am more familiar with ESXi for that.

If you're running a single ESX host, no need for virtual center. Here's the page for ESXi only. "VMware vSphere Hypervisor is the new name for what was formerly known as VMware ESXi Single Server or free ESXi (often abbreviated to simply “VMware ESXi”)"
http://www.vmware.co...rvisor/faq.html

You'll be golden. VMotion is used for moving a live VM from one host to another using shared storage and exactly networking setups (vswitches). Storage vmotion is the same but on the storage side. High Availability (HA) is useful for when a host has a hardware failure, the VM will restart up on another host, provided there is shared storage involved. (Among other things) Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) is a CPU/memory performance balance mechanism that moves VMs between host to ensure efficiency. Again, these are all great things, but if you have only one host, they're all useless.

I seem to remember that vCenter is $5000. So...that's not going to happen for someone like me who second guesses buying a 2TB hard drive that I don't need for $109.

[jmwills]

Back to my original plan then...migrate from HyperV to ESXi with an OpenFiler iSCSI target.

[jazzerjay]

Back to my original plan then...migrate from HyperV to ESXi with an OpenFiler iSCSI target.

http://www.vmware.co...erter/faqs.html

How much does VMware vCenter Converter cost?
VMware vCenter Converter is available free of charge for any user. Technical Support is not included and will need to be purchased separately. Does one need a license key to activate and use VMware vCenter Converter?
You do not require a license key to use the features of Converter.

[tojoski]

Back to my original plan then...migrate from HyperV to ESXi with an OpenFiler iSCSI target.

Just curious what made you decide on openfiler for the iscsi target?
p
You might consider OpenIndiana, which is basically the community supported Opensolaris : http://openindiana.org
or Nexenta, also solaris based http://nexentastor.o...ommunityEdition or ZfsGuru, based on FreeBSD : http://zfsguru.com

Openindiana and Nexenta provide iscsi support at the kernel level, and you get all the benefits of a ZFS backend for your storage.

edit: just realized you were talking about running openfiler on the microserver itself, probably not powerful enough for ZFS in that case.

Edited by tojoski, 07 February 2012 - 08:29 PM.