Because I work out of my home when I am not traveling, I have the plus of having my lab equipment local and the negative of having my lab equipment local, in that, the ambient noise and power consumption can get a little out of control. As often as I can, I look for the most powerful, quite systems I can find and consolidate.

When I first started researching desktop virtualization, a few years back. I started out with a Newisys 1U pizza box. It was one of the early units with Dual Core Opteron processors. The bad part is its defining loud. I kept it in a separate room and you can hear it all throughout the house. It has hosted my primary virtual desktop for over two years. Some time back, I decide to use a Sun U40 workstation as my Virtual Desktop testing environment. It has Dual Opteron’s and 10GB RAM with 4 x 250GB SATA drives. The problem I had going into it, was I knew it was not on the ESX HCL and because it’s based on the NVIDIA ck804, getting it too work seemed it would be near impossible. When ESX 3.0.1 released last year, I figured I would make another run at it. I have had it running for some time but, only shared the details with a few people 1:1

This week I decided to consolidate my lab systems further using ESX. Setup some iSCSI shared storage for my ESX hosts, for VMotion and testing virtual desktops running on iSCSI. This guide will outline the steps I took and explain what you need to do too run ESX on a Sun U40 Workstation and a Sun Java Station 2100. None of these systems are on the ESX HCL so this is completely unsupported. However, these are great systems for a lab environment as they are powerful and very quite.

Running ESX on a Sun U40 Workstation

Build of Materials:

• Sun U40 Dual AMD 250 procs
• 10GB RAM
• 4 x 250 SATA drives
• * Sun Dual Gigabit Ethernet Adapter
• * Sun - LSI SAS HBA - SG-XPCIE4SAS-Z :4 x1 4-Port SAS PCI-E HBA internal connection LSI3041E
• * SAS Cable # SAS-847P-F/.5m from www.cs-electronics.com

• Notes a key component

Flash the U40 bios to the latest bios with patches using the downloadable supplemental CD.

Install the NIC, SAS HBA, and cable the Sun U40 disk back plane. Once installed boot the system and go into the bios. Turn off the onboard SATA controllers. Also disable the on board NIC’s the NVIDIA Ethernet will not work with ESX 3.0.1. Save and re-boot

Enter the LSI bios and configure and Array. I used a stripe volume risking failure for more capacity. I tried to create VMFS volumes on the disks individually however that did not work. You have to set the disks into some sort of array.

Boot from the ESX 3.0.1 CD at the GRUB prompt boot with esx noapic and install ESX as desired.

Running ESX on a Sun 2100 Java Station

Build of Materials:

• Newisys 1U pizza box
• 2 x Opteron Procs - forget the model
• 4 GB DDR2 2700 RAM
• 2 x 72GB SCSI drives

• Sun 2100 Java Workstation
• 2 x Opteron 248 Procs
• 2GB DDR2 3200 RAM
• 1 x 72GB SCSI drive

Flash the 2100 with the latest bios from the supplemental CD. I removed the 4GB of RAM from the Newisys system and put it in the 2100. I took the 2GB from the 2100 and moved it to the U40 making it 12GB. The 2100 has SATA ports on the motherboard and can take an additional four SCSI drives. I am sticking with the 72GB SCSI drive for now and have it hooked into the iSCSI shared storage with a 140GB volume. I might play with the SATA later. Boot from the ESX 3.0.1 CD and install as you prefer. On the storage side I have a 1/2 TB NAS appliance. It also is not on the HCL. It also will not work without an unsupported patch. Read hear for more details - http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=468517 I also kept failing to realize the volumes needed to have 10% of space left for Metadata. Go figure after a lot of wrestling I got that sorted out. After applying the patch the NAS is working fine.

One note to mention, I run Virtual Center in a VM and it was running on the Newisys system to start with. I moved it with P2V to the U40 and shared storage. Once I had the 2100 running, I simply cold migrated it too the 2100. All the other VM’s that were on the Newisys system I also cold migrated before decommissioning it. Since my processors are not the same stepping level, I can not live VMotion but cold migrate and HA are working. At some point I might even out the processors. I am just glad I have two really, really quiet systems.