$1500 for a new ESXi server for vSphere 4.1 is a bit high. Unlike this guy, I have a lab in the basement so decibles aren’t as important as capex and opex costs.
Plus, to have a lab in the basement where I can do things with a cluster would require two of these beasties. Running a second on the iMac i7 probably won’t cut it. Last time I needed a lab for something it was because a network change crapped out 1/4 of my primary vSwitch.
I think I’d like to do a mock-up of the vCluster configs we have at work, then randomly shoot components to see how it fails. The network change issue was unexpected. Losing 1 out of the 4 strands of the portchannel going to a vswitch should not have cause the outage, however brief it was.
Meet My ESXi Server, the BabyDragon. | Error404 – Its A Blog.
VMWare ESXi 4.1 looks incredibaly interesting. It has better monitoring functions, better authentication integration and other cool features. I need to upgrade.
Sadly, the CPU in my current VMWare host doesn’t support the Intel vt extensions so it won’t run 64bit VMs, and it won’t support ESXi 4.1. So I’m looking at having to drop at least a grand to get a new server capable of running the latest VMWare. My Media Center PC could do it, but sadly, the Shuttle PC I was going to make my Media Center PC has a dead power supply, and Shuttle doesn’t carry accessories anymore.
Anyway, once the iTV ships, I can retire the Media PC and convert it to an ESXi host. Once I do that, here are a list of Virtual Appliances I want to play with:
- CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment), Digital Forensics and Security distro
- LogLogic Log Management Virtual Appliance
- HP LeftHand P4000 Virtual SAN Appliance (VSA) Software
- vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) [appliance for vSphere CLI, vSphere SDK for Perl, and SMI-S]
- TurnKey Amazon EC2 SDK Appliance