I'm liking just-released Fedora 14, but you might want to go 'pro' and wait for CentOS6, whenever they get around to it (basically a rebadged RHEL which also, just released a new version - 6)

Hmm, it seems CentOS don't do server releases, but Red Hat does a 30-day free evaluation release of RHEL 6. After that pricing goes steep. It does have a ton of virtualization upgrades though.

Hmm indeed!! I've been looking for a decent (yet free :-$ )virtualisation host for a while - what does this free version not do?

Limits to single host less cpu's and only 256Gb RAM, no vmotion, HA or physical to virtual importing and a few other high end option that you probably wont use. Other than that its pretty feature rich. From doing the esxi3.5 course and exam its a much better and easier platform to configure and use, I just need to book the upgrade exam now.

"only" 256GB of RAM :'D

Single host - so you can't set up a bunch of ESXi hosts and cluster them.. not needed in my case, good! Less CPU's - meh, more than two quad's is unlikely.

Does it have the built-in management console, or does it HAVE to be managed using vSphere :/ ?

edit: reading the f'in manual does answer a lot of my questions..

The basic managment console on the server lets you setup the network, DNS and initial security. Once the server is installed you pretty much leave it alone and control it from the Vsphere client.

 

One thing I did have a problem with is the disk setup, I missed the advanced setup and ended up using the whole disk instead of just a single partition so be carefull, luckily I had nothing of value on the disk before installing.

 

The install is about 70Mb and the server it self uses around 300 to 500Mb of RAM, which has left me with only 1.5Gb for the VM's. I have a copy of 2008 small business I want to play around with so I need to get another 2Gb I think.

That sounds pretty good then!
I think I'll be running it on a single quad-core Xeon with 6GB of RAM, so should be able to fit 3-4 Linux servers on it. Not quite sure about the disks in that box though, they're a bit iffy (ie: HP compatible ones instead of genuine..).

Well good luck and report back with your progress.

Thanks I shall don my fedora and download a copy.

Bah and double Bah, My 3.4Ghz Xeons do not support VT and therefor do not support 64bit Vm's :@ Grrr indeed. Ebay may be of help!

Nope that won't work as the chipset and socket wont take a VT enabled cpu.

 

32bit for me then :|

Last week I set up 3 2003 VM's using ESXi 4.1. I must say it's a pretty sweet setup! I need more RAM to make it run a little smoother, but overall I'm very pleased.

Is there a reason this thread is in the Teh Forum folder? :?

Yes.

How much Ram does your host have?

Right now it's only 2GB. I'd like to at least double that with the 3 VM's that I have now. If I run more than three I might look at 8 or so GB.

 

Even with only 2GB, they run pretty smooth. If I boot more than one up at a time or restart more than one that's when I notice a little lag, but nothing major.

 

Have you used the VMWare Go site? It's kind of like the VSphere Client but it's web based. It actually said people with a setup like mine usually run 3 OS's.

I had a look around the site, its pretty impresive what they have done to get users up and running. I now have a Fedora 14 install problem to work out, it keep freezing on install. I might download the ISO again.

 

I think I am going to run these OS's on mine:

 

XP sp3
WIndows Home Server
Small Business 2003 (just for playing around with)
Fedora 14
Unbuntu 10

 

Probably only run max two at a time until I get more ram.

 

No all I need to do is get power and network in to my loft.

>Fedora 14 install problem to work out, it keep freezing on install.

 

Does it get almost to the end, then hangs on a 'doing sumpin to the file sytem' message ?

 

This happened to me in virtualbox until I boosted the size of the virtual disk to 10G and memory of the vm to 512MB. Then it went fine.

 

After the installation & first boot, I reset it to 384 and it seemed to work ok, Anyways I went ahead with a bare metal install and deleted the vdi for disk space after.

It fails to boot at all after the first menu, just hangs, no cpu or disk activity at all.

I find virtualbox usually lags a few releases behind the latest linux kernels and/or xorg builds, so I was surprised I got it working at all. Dunno about vmware. Here's a prebuilt Fedora 14 vmware image you could try.

Actually, if you want to try oracle's version of opennotsolaris with zfs goodness, that's just out too. You may hate oracle, and with good reason, but recall opennotsolaris was also opennot under the sun regime.

 

I'm booting it into virtualbox and indeed contemplating a bare metal install too.