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

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> >>> 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.

I run ESX on several "unsupported" machines,  and it works OK.
Certifying machines is tedious and expensive so it is natural for the
list to be short.   The only thing I've seen that they specifically
dis-support is IDE which also makes sense;  ESX is an enterprise product
and most PATA/SATA devices cannot be guaranteed safe
<http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/SCSI_vs._IDE/SATA_Disks>.
Certification is such a guarantee, if your willing to live without
it....   Even my production *systems* are "unsupported",  the OEM
extended their own guarantee that the individual components were all
supported.