Project vmware

[videodrone83]

My current setup is (Based off of Ockie's Galaxy series)

CM Stacker 810
Highpoint 2220 Raid (No raid being used)
Seagate 5x500gb
Seagate 2x1.5tb
Seagate 250gb (System Drive)
2x iStar 3x5.25 to 5x3.25 SATA/SAS Bays
500w Fortron PSU

working in the IT field I need to learn how to use vmware so after some thought I came up with this worklog

I am going to be purchasing an APC Netshelter 25u cabinet
http://codemicro.com/store/check_price.php?partno=AR2105BLK

and since i dont have loads of cash to replicate an actual enterprise system SAN im going to be doing the build it yourself setup using either MySAN or OpenFiler and try to learn vmware and HA

My VM box's will be

2x Supermicro CSE-512L-260B 14" mini 1u Server Case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811152087

2x Asus P5N-E Motherboards
2x Intel Q6600's (VTT Support)
4gb of ram in each box

My SAN will consist of

iStar D-406-ND 4u Server Case
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811165065
Intel E6600 C2D
4gb RAM
Areca ARC-1210 4x Sata Raid
3xWD 1TB Black SATA Drives (Raid 5)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284

In goals to learn vmware and have 2 vm's and 1 san system and be able to use high availability and eventually transfer all my data from my old server to the new setup.?

What do you guys think? I will be starting this project soon and taking pictures along the way

 

[Zzyzxx]

I'm going to assume that if you're going whole hog Vmware with a (faux) san and the works, you're going with free ESX as the platform? Check out FREENAS for your SAN, it'll emulate iSCSI.

As far as having a 250gb drive as your OS, if you're going ESX, 99% of the implementations I've seen use a thumbdrive as the boot drive, which mount the OS and VM's.

Save a few bucks on your controller(s) - go with Perc 5i's.

 

[videodrone83]

pirated version out

 

[videodrone83]

using a thumb drive as a boot how slow would it be compared to a drives

 

[Zzyzxx]

using a thumb drive as a boot how slow would it be compared to a drives

It's very fast - ESX has an incredibly small platform, it just needs to load into memory once and it stays resident. There's almost no I/O (to the thumbdrive) after that.