I am currently running a Pentium D 915 with 2GB DDR2 and 80GB SATA drive and a 10/100 NIC all on a Gigabyte motherboard. I have been having problems, for example I get kernel panics when installing CentOS 5.3 http://communities.vmware.com/thread/208117 and can't get Ubuntu 8.04 server to install. I believe both of these are related to my processor/motherboard combo. With that said I am considering possibly switching to older server hardware which would be dual Intel Xeon 2.0GHz CPU - SL6EM - 2000DP/512L2/400/1.50V on a Thunder i7501 motherboard with registered ECC memory, not sure how much I can get for free and some 10k SCSI drives. My hope is that switching to this hardware would get rid of the problems I am having without a huge hit in performance but I don't know honestly. I am also considering the switch as the motherboard has dual gigabit NICs which would allow me to upgrade to ESXi 4.0.
So I just wanted to get some thoughts, is it worth the change?
Anyone have any thoughts? Do I need to move this post to another forum?
What VMware product are you using? Are trying to install Centos into a VM?
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ESXi 3.5 update 4, I would like to upgrade to 4.0 but I need a gigabit NIC. I was trying to install CentOS 5.3 as a guest. I also could not get Ubuntu 8.04 server 32-bit to install, possibly related to hardware problems.