This weekend I will be focussing my attention on getting my new (old) HP XW6200 workstation transformed into a VMWare ESXi 4.1 test rig.
Bought on eBay for £166.00.
I did take a brief look at the Oracle VM 2.2 offering, but it required about twice the amount of storage space to install it compared to the ~200MB required by VMWare ESXi 4.1 and it didn’t have the nice GUI for simplicity or the excellent VMWare converter for transfering my existing VirtualBox guest VMs to the virtual infrastructure.
The plan is to install VMWare onto a USB pen device, then use the 500GB SATA disk and 1TB SATA disk as virtual disk storage where I can host all manner of Virtual Servers.
I’m planning to use OpenFiler inside a virtual appliance, to provide a shared chunk of disk via iSCSI so that I can get ASM working in a cluster.
I’m hoping to get an Oracle Unbreakable Linux server running and download the beta Oracle 11gR2 XE RDBMS.
For those of you in the know, Oracle don’t officially support VMWare (I wonder why…) but since I’m not running a production database, this is not a problem. I know for sure that it *will* work fine.
The XW6200 machine spec:
2 x Intel Xeon 3.4gGhz with HT and EM64t.
256MB graphics card.
4GB RAM (for the moment, but will support 8GB via 4x2GB DIMMS).
500GB SATA
1TB SATA
CDROM
Floppy (really!)
USB sockets galore.
It’s a little power sucker, but it supports wake-on-lan so I can have it shutdown until required.