[GRLUG] VMWare ESXi Was: Raid, LVM, and Cheap Storage

[Collin Kidder]

>>>> environments.
>>>>         
>>> We've recently started scrapping out all our old hardware and
>>> consolidating on VMware ESX on a pair of Silicon Mechanics servers
>>> connected to an EMC SAN via iSCSI.  Myriad physical servers is too much
>>> of a maintanence burden, too hot, and too inflexible.  This frees up IT
>>> to focus on interesting/useful problems.
>>>       
>> VMware is great for combining old hardware, especially servers with
>> low resource requirements (like Linux firewalls).
>>     
>
> I've consolidated servers with high resource requirements. :)  So far
> I'm nothing but impressed regarding performance; part because even
> "busy" servers spend a fair amount of time idle and current servers have
> *8* cores...
>
>   
It sounds great but I had a difficult time on their website in even 
determining what it runs on. From what I can gather it's extraordinarily 
picky about what it runs on. What good is a product that seems to run on 
three different machines? (Ok, I'm exaggerating but really the hardware 
requirements seem way too selective.) It sounds like you need a brand 
new server from only certain manufacturers and it had better have one of 
a very few CPU's, very few different NICs, etc.