IDE hard disks

[InforMed_Direct]

Having used VMware workstation, player and free server for several years, I'm currently evaluating ESX server with a view to rolling it out on our production servers primarily for disaster recovery.

So I'm trying to install on a reasonably high power (dual-core, lots of RAM) PC but this PC happens to have IDE hard disks. The installation progrem says we should use SCSI but don't have a system like that to hand.

It said that extra configuration is required - what extra configuration exactly?

Thanks, Rob.

[TomHowarth]

ESX can be installed on an IDE based system but you will not be able to run any Guests as the Kernel does not have the IDE drivers in it. I would recommend a visit to ebay and aquire a adaptec 2940 and one disk, I picked one up recently for £21 plus postage and packaging.

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[rpartmann]

Hi,

you can install ESX on IDE drives but you cant create a VMFS on IDE only on SCSI, SAN Luns or iSCSI LUNs.

For testing you can install 2 similar boxes with ESX (take at least 2 nic´s in each PC) and one PC with Linux and ISCSI Target. With this simple setup you can test even VMOTION, HA, ..

But this is limited in terms of performance, stability,... a development and test environment not more.

kind regards,

Reinhard.

[InforMed_Direct]

ESX can be installed on an IDE based system but you will not be able to run any Guests as the Kernel does not have the IDE drivers in it. I would recommend a visit to ebay and aquire a adaptec 2940 and one disk, I picked one up recently for £21 plus postage and packaging.

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

Hmm, if you can't actually do anything when you're in there (like run a guest) then it rather defeats the purpose of trying to use this system for evaluation.

Cheers, Rob.

[InforMed_Direct]

ESX can be installed on an IDE based system but you will not be able to run any Guests as the Kernel does not have the IDE drivers in it. I would recommend a visit to ebay and aquire a adaptec 2940 and one disk, I picked one up recently for £21 plus postage and packaging.

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

Actually I think we do have something like this lying around. We decomissioned an old Dell PowerEdge which had a SCSI disk system and we've got a couple of older Adaptec SCSI cards in the cupboard. Just need to see if we can remove the SCSI drives from the caddies.

Cheers, Rob.

[TomHowarth]

you can install ESX to the ide disks and use the iSCSI initiator to attach to an iSCSI target, and then use that to host your VMFS partition. this could be a bunch of IDE or SATA disks if you wish on another cheap system.

Tom Howarth

VMware Communities User Moderator

[InforMed_Direct]

Accepted that ESX server is really a server product and that you should really use SCSI virtual disks.

Rob.

[azn2kew]

Do you have an option to get 2 (500GB SATA & SATA controllers?) if so, this is the best way to test your lab with enough VMFS storage and redundant. There are so many possiblities you can have your test lab it just depends how you put together your hardware. IDE can't have VMFS and so defeats the purpose of creating VMs for testing. You can find a lot of good systems that have been tested here

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