markhsa's Posts

I am building a test lab ( I want to learn more about VSphere/ESXi, Vmotion etc.. ) and am putting my own linux servers etc…. on it. I have two ESXi servers, both with only one NIC in them on a 192.168.0.* network.  Also a NAS on that same network. The more I learn, the more I see that there are typically separate networks for: -Vmotion -Storage -Management -VMNet??  Don’t know what that is. What is a good setup for networking on this do you think?  Would two nics per box do it?  192.168.0.* for Management and general networking on one NIC 10.1.1.* for Vmotion, Storage, and VMNet?? Just wondering if you have any thoughts on this.  I can see that all if it on one network may not be the best and might cause VMotion issues as well. Thoughts?

I have a machine, that works great, BUT, it takes about 10 minutes to boot? Weird part - If I put a hard drive in there that has windows on it, fast boot! Gigabyte X58a-ud3r board, VT-d enabled, all works great with install and running.  The boot is the weird part. It is installed on a sata 1TB drive. Bios boots, gets past DMI scan, to where it should hit the OS and see ESXi yellow screen run by.  It sits there on a black screen ( I can see the HD activity light solid on during this time BTW ) then after 10 min, starts its boot up. Not sure if this could be related, but when ESXi does start to boot, it hangs for a good couple or three minutes on loading achi section. Only with ESXi disk though, so its not the bios or anything.  What could be causing this weird behavior?  Thanks all for the help in this forum. Just working out the last bugs now.

I have the ESXi free installed and on the 60 day eval.  I have to say, its working very very well. This leads me to some questions for ongoing use.  As this is just for a home learning server...... Cost: 1) This is where I am confused.  I have installed ESXi V5.  I have Vspere SLES Vcentre running on that ESXi server. I also have an XP instance on the ESXi install. So, as I want this to be free ( I want to use the free part of this ), where will I run into issues and how do I manage the ESXi install? As I understand, I have a 60 day eval ( no key installed, just 60 days as I did not enter a key ), the SUSE Vcentre will stop working correct?  So from that point, can I just use the Vcentre client on XP to connect to ESXi and manage it?  Avoiding the VCentre server and direct to the ESXi install? USB drive install: I have this installed right now on a single hard drive.  However, it would seem that installing on a USB ( 1 or 2 gig ) pen drive and booting from that pluged into the back of the computer would be a good idea.  No moving parts to fail on the drive etc...  Then have the data for the OS's on hard drives in the computer. Are there any performance issues with a USB pen drive install?  They are likely slower than a 7200 RPM drive I would suspect? Thoughts around this? Thanks all.  I am looking forward to better understanding the licensing especially.

Moving a Linux system from HW to ESXi5.  OS works perfectly. On old HW, I connected to an HD Cable box via 1394 Firewire and sent channel change commands via firewire.  Worked very very well. Now, when I will be on VMWare, I wil only have access to USB as I understand.  This leaves me with a problem as USB channel change options are very sub-par. Is there anyway to get such a trivial amount of traffic, firewire setup working under ESXi5?  PCI passthrough?  Anything? I have researched and have fuond very very little so far. My ESXi motherboard does have a firewire card, but I could plug in a PCI one too is that would help. I would really appreciate assistance or feed back on this.  Seems a bit of a show stopper so far.

I want to know if this is possible. I have been unable to find any definitive information on this yet. I have a Dell T710. I want to install ESX(i) on it and have client OS's on it that have a dedicated video card each. They will be HDTV front ends. So, multiple Nvidia PCIe cards and each VM ( Fedora ) would get a direct access to a video card. Thoughts? Mark

This should be very simple, and I have reasearched what the issue could be but have not found anything yet. Setup. Vmware workstation 7 on Fedora 13. I have several VM's working fine via bridged network. No problems I am now installing ESX 4.1, specify a static ip, proper gateway etc.... and it installs fine. Problem: I am unable to get to the IP I have specified by http, ping etc... I go into troubleshooting mode, ifconfig and see my IP ( 192.168.0.40 ) setup in ESX, but cant ping out either. I am a Linux Admin by trade, so I have checked things and cent see any issues so far. What can I check? I have double checked my settings for networking BTW and all looks fine. Advice or things to check? Thanks for the help.