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What Is Your Virtual Server?

ascorbic

By ascorbic
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ascorbic Newbie

ascorbic

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I am almost finished setting up my virtual machine server. In light of episode 7x17 I am curious if anyone else has a virtual machine server at home. Ever since episode 5x19 I have been wanting one of my own, and now it is almost complete. My goal was to create something as quiet and powerful as possible. Functionally I wanted a virtual router, NAS and a playground. I want to put it in the closet and forget about it. Here is what I have so far. Most of the items were bought from eBay to keep the cost low, other things have been recycled.

Case: Antec P182

Power Supply: Antec NEO ECO 400 Watt

CPU: Intel Core i7 I7-930 2.8 GHz

Motherboard: Intel DX58SO

CPU Heatsink: Noctua NH-D14 running with low power adapters

Hard Drives:

- 2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1 TB 7200 SATA 3.0Gb/s running as a raw drive for OpenFiler

- 1x Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB SATA 3.0Gb/s running as a raw drive for OpenFiler

- 1x Really old Maxtor 160 GB SATA 1.5Gb/s running as main drive for ESXi

Memory: 2x Kingston 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (soon to be 12GB, then 16GB).

Video Card: G55-MDDE32F Matrox Millennium G550 PCIe 1x

NIC:

- INTEL PRO/1000 PT Quad Port Adapter for Untangle

- INTEL PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Adapter for Untangle

- On board NIC for management

The next plan of action will be to replace that old Maxtor which is giving off a lot of heat with an SSD or if I can't get one cheap enough a traditional high speed drive. That should also be a huge performance boost. Then memory will get maxed out as prices come down later.

So far I have the following OSes running

-Backtrack 4

-Fedora 13

-Windows 7 (for .NET development and ESXi management since their interface is windows only)

-Untangle - once I get everyting configured properly this machine will be my router/firewall.

-OpenFiler - Network Attached Storage.

Next I will be adding Ubuntu Latest and Windows Server 2008 R2.

I have installed rdesktop on my regular desktop to access the machines and xrdp on the linux guests because it beats the pants off VNC.

If anyone is interested I can get some pics later.

For reference I needed to enable the unsupported ESXI service console so that I could map my drives as raw devices in OpenFiler, here are the tutorials I used.

http://vmwaretips.com/wp/2008/10/20/access...ervice-console/

http://www.mattiasholm.com/node/33

ESXi is rocking out pretty great. I am jealous of Virtual Boxes build in RDP server through because I did have problems getting Fedora and sesman to play nicely.

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MRGRIM Newbie

MRGRIM

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Case: Asus (or some sort)

Power: Corsair HX520W

CPU : AMD Phenom II X2 545 3GHz

Motherboard: ASUS M4A78-EM

CPU Heatsink: Stock

Harddrives: 2 x Western Digtal 500GB Green (Mirrored)

Memory: 8GB (4x2GB DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 XMS2)

Corsair 8GB (4×2GB)

Graphics: Some random £10 card as I didn't buy a mobo with onboard (oops)

Network: Single GB port

Running on Citrix XenServer

3 x Server 2003

2 x Server 2008

1 x Fedora 8

Edited by MRGRIM
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brianzimm Newbie

brianzimm

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Intel SR1530

Xeon X3220

8GB Ram

2 x 500GB HD

This is in a data center running ESXi 4.0

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Infiltrator Newbie

Infiltrator

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Asus Extreme Striker motherboard

x8giga of DDR2 ram

E6660 Quad Core Intel CPU

10RPM raptor HDD

Nvidia GTX 620 DDR 3

1TB external HDD

I run virtual machines, also use it for generating rainbow tables and for cracking passwords as well.

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cabster21 Newbie

cabster21

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Virtual is my reality baby.

Forgetting that, I use:

Intel Pentium D 805 (4.1GHZ no more, down to 3.4 air cooled)

6GB DDR2 Geil

Antec 550PSU

XFX 6800 XT!!!!!!

Asus P5ND2-SLi (Not deluxe - infact I posted pics of this when it was my main system...)

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cabster21 Newbie

cabster21

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Virtual is my reality baby.

Forgetting that, I use:

Intel Pentium D 805 (4.1GHZ no more, down to 3.4 air cooled)

6GB DDR2 Geil

Antec 550PSU

XFX 6800 XT!!!!!!

Asus P5ND2-SLi (Not deluxe - infact I posted pics of this when it was my main system...)

I don't think I would put an i7 for a server - home that is. I never use this, it's a total waste. If I didn't need a notebook I would still use that tomshardware animal

I did mean to click edit...

Edited by cabster21
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Bercik Newbie

Bercik

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Celeron 500Mhz

384 RAM

60G 2.5"

You may start laughing in 4...3...2...

It have been serving me for years as a server. I started virtualization year ago. I wanted to upgrade to Atom 330, but can't find any cheap and quiet PSU.

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h3%5kr3w Newbie

h3%5kr3w

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Well, it's not a virtual server yet, but I want to use it as one once I upgrade the memory a tad.

E-Machines Celeron-D 356

3.33ghz/stock fan cooled (and xtremely quiet)

Old 20gig 7200rpm drive

stock 150gig(unhooked for now/lady had cancer that gave it to me. I just keep it just in case she wants anything out of it)

512mb ram

Yeah, she's a whoppin' machine alright :P Actually it would run excellently for what I need it for once I upgrade the memory in it. Has 2 sata plugs, lots of slots too.

I would like to make it a vmware esxi server but for now it's running an OS with some software I use all the time.

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Zimmer Newbie

Zimmer

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Dang I guess I don't have the slowest machine with a 600mhz Pentium III, 5G Hard Drive, and 128 mb RAM :(. < still ran win 2k and xubuntu good till the monitor went toast. I miss win 2k. It ran one server,

i don't think it could handle virtual servers on top of that

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joeypesci Newbie

joeypesci

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On the cheap a bit as the PC was free but the CPU can't really cut it so need to replace it really but I currently use

A HP 7900 with E5200 2.5ghz - free

Discovered it can't do 64bit VM's :(

8GB RAM-Brought

2TB HDD-Brought

People may laugh but as I haven't touched ESXi yet I've gone with Win 7 64bit and that runs VMWare Workstation 7.

Currently hosting

DC1- server 2008 RC1 32bit

DC2 Replication server - server 2008 RC1 32bit

File Server - server 2008 RC1 32bit

Torrent box - Previously was a physical box but used VMWare converter to convert it-XP sp3

Little is done on it at moment due to the poor CPU. Mainly run test VMs on my main i7 rig.

Looking to get a Intel Core 2 Quad Q9650 Socket 775 3GHz 1333FSB 12MB which will fit on this board and in this case to replace the stock chip. Not sure if it will be as good as an i7 though.

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digip Newbie

digip

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I have a Micro ATX Pentium Dual Core E6300, 4GB and a ATX Core 2 Duo E6750 with 8GB. My main machine is a AMD Phenom x6 1055T with 8GM.

How do you like the X6? Was thinking of picking up this kit: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/se...C7BBTkwCjCECjCE

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h3%5kr3w Newbie

h3%5kr3w

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@joeypesci - Hey man, I gotta tell ya, windows 7 has some odd issue with the esxi management program. That's the only reason why I haven't messed with it yet (we were going to in class, had a really sweet dual 4x xeon proc kit we built to use with it, but it took the entire network class budget for the semester, and hardly anything was compatible with it, and to top it all off, the only os we had installed on our systems was windows 7, so it ended up being a multipurpose server for wifi/routing/imaging/other stuff in class running server 08)

Maybe VmWare came out with a newer version compatible with Windows 7? Watch your raid controllers and only go for compatibility I would definitely say...

Edited by h3%5kr3w
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VaKo Newbie

VaKo

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How do you like the X6? Was thinking of picking up this kit: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/se...C7BBTkwCjCECjCE

Its not an i7, and if your a gamer then i5 is probably a better bet although generally they are on par (i5 has the edge on speed per core, 1055T has the edge on number of cores). But for the price, and the fact that my new mobo has USB3 and SATA3 its a nice buy. Only issue is that atm more apps are single threaded, so its very hard to find anything other than content creation apps or virtualization that really takes advantage of the cores. For a general purpose, cheap computer the 1055T is a nice CPU, gets 7.4 on the W7 test, hasn't stalled on the tasks I've given it and fits my style of "everything running all at once, 300+ firefox tabs, last rebooted a month ago" computing.

As for that machine, I got an Antec 300 case, a GA-890GPA-UD3H motherboard (2x USB 3, 6x SATA III, 2x SATAII), 8GB of PC10666 own-brand RAM and I got a free 9800GTX card to go with it.

If you having issues with ESXi you can try MS Hyper-V Server which is also free and supports far more hardware configurations.

h3%5kr3w: Update your ESXi box to the latest version, using the update manager tool, remove the client, reinstall the latest version from the ESXi box itself, no problems at my end of W7 x64.

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mr klink Newbie

mr klink

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Just thought I'd put mine in as well

Intel SE7520AF2 mobo

8GB Ram

Dual Xeon 3.4GHz Nacona

Intel SC5300 Case

3Ware 9550SX-16ML

6x 1TB Western Digital (WD1002FBYS) in Raid 5 ~4.5TB

Running Server 2k3 Enterprise x32 with Vmware server 2.0.2

I know, I know, not the most efficient way to run VMs, but this server also is main storage for well.... everything come to think about it.

FYI. To anyone running vmware server on a x32 windows box you will only be able allocate about 1.2GB ram max per VM, any more and you will get an enormous amount of disk swapping. Unless you use the /3GB start-up switch, but that opens up another can of worms.

Edited by mr klink
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Tex© Newbie

Tex©

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sorry to bump this up just started to play with it and every thing seems to work up to the point of running

python VBoxWebSrv.py

i get this error

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "VBoxWebSrv.py", line 26, in &lt;module&gt;
    import cherrypy
ImportError: No module named cherrypy

any ideas?

Edited by Tex©
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