Think the Web Blog

We recently bought two Aberdeen Stirling 169 machines to go into our data center for a web and database machine. The database machine I want to run Windows on bare hardware but for the web machine I like the idea of running some type of a Hypervisor so that I can get multiple virtual machines running on the same hardware. My first option was the Hyper-V that comes with Microsoft Windows Server 2008. But after finding out that it did not come with my Website Spark subscription I had to come up with a new idea. That idea was VMWare ESXi. The free version of ESX that was released in July of 2008. I am already familiar with ESX as I have used it quite a lot in the past so this seemed like a good option.

Unfortunately, it does not install out of the box on the Aberdeen server that we bought. I was able to get it to work and I’m sure someone else could benefit from a little explanation of what I had to do.

There are two problems that prevent a simple install.

• The Areca raid card was not supported
• The Intel network card was not supported

This is a bit of an interesting situation since I have two unsupported devices on this server. Searching around I would find a fix for one, or the other, but not both together. In order to perform this installation this is what you will need:

• VirtualBox
• Ubuntu Desktop 9.10 ISO
• VMWare ESXi 4.0 ISO
• Areca ESXi 4.0 oem.tgz
• Areca ESXi 4.0 inetd.conf
• Areca ESXi 4.0 mkesxiaio_3.8.sh
• VMware ESX/ESXi 4.0 Driver CD for Intel 82575 and 82576 Gigabit Ethernet Controller
• 7-Zip

Now the reason I have VirtualBox and Ubuntu Desktop listed out there is that the Areca drivers come with an easy way to integrate their drivers into the ESXi CD. But you need to have access to a linux machine in order to do this. There are some ways to do it directly using windows but it seemed a bit more complicated than what I had to do to get it to work.

(more…)

When researching servers for our new data center one thing that I wanted to make sure to get support for is remote management. We won’t always have someone in front of the server. But we do always need access to the servers in the event of a problem.

What we found were servers from Aberdeen Inc., built from SuperMicro components and included an IPMI card installed. From what I understood this included full remote management support including power control and console support. There was even mention of CD/DVD redirection which sounded quite intriguing. Because of this I had planned on setting up these machines “remotely.” Even though I would be in the same room as the server I wanted to test out their ability to be managed remotely and most impressively installing the operating system from the IPMI solution.

(more…)