Virtualized Again

I used to have the windows server that runs dylanbright.com on vmware server on top of Suse linux. Then one week I decided to move to 2008 server running directly on more recent hardware. Then a couple weeks ago, Vmware released ESX3i for free. That got me pretty excited, so I installed that on what was the 2008 machine. Then I got to thinking how cool it would be if I had it on a multi-core processor, so I installed ESX 3i on what was my current dual core desktop machine. I haven't used the desktop machine much at all since I got my personal laptop. I really don't play pc games anymore. So I thought, what the hell, might as well use it for this.

Now I have a $200 (at the time I bought it) video card and a 21 inch monitor which displays the three color text only ESX 3i console. That makes me a little sad.

ESX 3i seems pretty tolerant of consumer hardware, something regular ESX was picky about. That's cool. You don't have to get that fancy $300 broadcom NIC on ebay anymore. Now you too can have an Enterprise virtualization solution in your own home. It is very easy to set up. You pop in the CD, wait a little while for it to install, then give it an IP address, and you're done. I ordered some more RAM for the desktop 3i machine, so now it has 4 GBs of RAM and I am able to run three instances of 2008 server without too much slowness. Memory and disk IO are my bottlenecks. My motherboard is temperamental about having all four memory slots filled, or I would have 6 GBs if RAM. Disk IO is harder to fix.