Hands on experience

[ikcibab]

So, I have 3 servers to use all with good diskspace, HBA cards installed, 4 GB memory each. (2 dell 2650 and 1 2950)

In a perfect world I build a ESX Server Cluster attached to the SAN, but as we are not in a perfect world I am not allowed.

so i now have theses servers, no SAN, no NAS. Does anyone have any suggestions on how i can use these servers to test all of ESX Servers bells and whistles?

without attaching it to the production network or the dev network. can i use a Server as a NAS or SAN?

Thanks in advance for the info

[weinstein5]

I would take a look at some of the open source NAS/iSCSI tragets like FreeNAS or OpenFiler - with these you can buil shared storage - I would load one of these on of your physical boxes and use it as your shared storage - the other is where you will install esx - on one of your hosts build a VM to be used as VC - that should give you an environment where you can play with it all -

[williambishop]

Take the odd server out, load it with disk, install linux and create an NFS share.

Take the two identical servers, load esx on them, and use the nfs share as the "shared" volume.

You can now do ha, drs, and still get decent performance out of the group.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Moved to appropriate forum.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[ikcibab]

Thank you both for the advice, i will get started shortly.