Thursday, June 16, 2011

Server Setup

I decided to test out VMWare's ESXi server 4.1. I got the install on a cd, setup my usb cd-rom drive, and got it all loaded without much trouble at all. Then I found out that the hard drives are setup as 4 seperate hard drives. No RAID setup at all...so I will be resetting that when I get back to Potlatch. (I am at a conference in Boise for the week.)

But since I have remote access to the server while at my conference, why not test out some of the settings and setup a Windows XP and Windows Server Core 2008x64 virtual machines.

Windows XP was no problem at all. Although I found out that Windows XP defaults to an IDE hard drive setup. Well apparently you can't change the size of an IDE hard drive. You can change the size of a SCSI hard drive. But you can convert an IDE drive to SCSI, change the size and then change it back to IDE. (How To)

Needless to say, I will now be using SCSI drives only!

More information about my official server setup will follow when I get back to town and setup the RAID. I will post any new information that I find and figure out as I continue to setup my server.

New Server!

I am so excited to announce that I was allowed to purchase a new server...budget: $3500. So I went shopping...here are the specs:

*Dual Xeon (Quad-Core) 2.13Ghz
*16 Gb of DDR3
*4 Tb of Hard Drive Space

Nothing pre-loaded on it...

So the first thing I did was get a space set aside for it on the rack and get it placed inside. I might want to get a second power supply, it only came with one, but I don't think those are too expensive and redundant power supplies aren't that mission critical for this server. I plan to use it for mostly a file server, to increase storage space. More on what I did with the server in another post.