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Any idea what the IBM System i is? Ever heard of the System i5? How about the AS/400? If not, you should know about it. You've probably heard the numbers about how all the fortune 100 companies and fortune 500 companies are using VMware right? Well guess what, they all have one of these old green screen machines too! And guess what, it's more than just some Warehouse Inventory system. There is a reason that all these companies have one, it can do just about everything, and I am going to make you a believer .

Now I'm not about to write an essay on why the System i is so great, but if you keep reading my posts, you will get why I'm so excited right now.

So how does VMware fit in with the System i? Well in a nut shell - The System i (which a lot of big companies have) can act as an iSCSI SAN, and you can boot IBM BladeServers and IBM System x Servers from this SAN, and have your shared storage too! Why is that so great? Because the IBM System i is one of the most reliable pieces of hardware on the planet! Because your company probably already has one! Because you can have a great backup and recovery platform! I could keep going, and trust me I will on subsequent posts, but I want to keep you interested, and move on for those people who already are experiencing the joy of this technology.

The big news - IBM announced during VMworld that ESX 3.5 is now supported on System i Integration. Here is the link to the site that explains it all. Starting with i5/OS version V5R4 ESX could be installed but only 3.0.1 and 3.0.2 were supported. It looks like this is still the case and as of this second, I am running ESX 3.0.2 build 52542 on one HS20 Blade and ESX 3.0.2 build 61618 - I'm just testing stuff, that's why I have 2 builds. I got all this going when we were at V5R4, but we have since upgraded to V6R1 - YAY!!!:D Shared storage is supported! And while I was in Vegas at fabulous VMworld 2008, ESX 3.5 is now supported. So now I need to upgrade to ESX 3.5 and build my HA and DRS Cluster. I can't wait! I'm glad to see IBM making the commitment to support VMware on this platform, the next step is for VMware to run natively on a Power System LPAR.

So here is a quick rundown of the hardware and software:

IBM System i5: Model 520 - 0595 Expansion Unit with 6 146GB 15k drives. 1 iSCSI HBA (soon to be 2). O/S V6R1

IBM BladeCenter S Chassis

2 - IBM BladeServer: HS20 Blade - 2 Dual Core 2.66 Ghz Intel Proc. 8 GB RAM. QLogic iSCSI HBA. O/S ESX 3.0.2 (soon to be 3.5)

I have VirtualCenter Server 2.5 running in a VM

That's all pretty basic stuff, but when I need to back everything up, the i5 does it for me. We have an LTO3 attached to it, and it backs up everything running on the i5 (Domino, Content On Demand, WebSphere, and now VMware)

Next weekend I am hoping to do the upgrade to ESX 3.5 - wish me luck! I'll be posting after the upgrade.