Hi,
Cant seem to find whether this is 64bit or 32bit.
HP ProLiant ML115 G5 Tower Server - Misco.co.uk
anyone help
thanks
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Hi,
Cant seem to find whether this is 64bit or 32bit.
HP ProLiant ML115 G5 Tower Server - Misco.co.uk
anyone help
thanks
Not conclusive evidence but....
Processor is capable of 32 bit and 64 bit operation
Quad-Core AMD Opteron? Processor Key Features
HP Website includes driver support for 32 bit & 64 bit OS
It is, I think pretty much all AMDs have been 64-bit for a long time, far longer than Intel.
I have the same server and I'm using it for ESXi. 8GB RAM, boots off USB, 2x 1Gb NICs, SAN for storage, absolutely awesome for the price.
EDIT: If you want more proof: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...B3.2C_65_nm.29 - AMD64.
Cheers,
Chris
64bit, with AMD-V (along with bios support) allowing it to run 64 bit virtual machines. A number of us use them for ESXi testing machines (I just use one at home for an ESXi server).
Hi. Thanks for that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Duke
Hope you dont mind if i ask some questions like what OS do you use? Why boot off USB and not load ESX on to disk and also whats all this SAN storage business? Better than NAS?(not that i am familiar with that either)
I am very much a laggard
If i was to get this server i would get a ram upgrade but also am interested in hypervisor and storage options
Thanks
a san has better performance then a nas, but basicly they are the same thing, just they go around things in different ways, you can get different types e.g fiber channel and also Iscisi. I would say use ESXI as is cheap as chips (free!). he is probly booting from USB as has no hard disk in the actual server? theres not much point paying loads of money for a disk if only a few hundred meg is installed.
So i guess this removes the issue of having to transfer data if you take the DC down with the data on and saves replication of data if i was to have to copy all data onto another DC to take one down.
Expensive solutions though I see
expensive,
The nice thing about them tho, if you store you vmx files (virtual hard disks) if the esxi host dies, all you need to do is show the files to another ESXI host and just boot. reduces the downtime. altho don't think it works that simply from a Intel machine onto a AMD machine.
you could also just buy a NAS that has ISCISI and set it up that way. Just make sure you have a raid controller in the nas otherwise it is pointless has no redundency.
you could buy another server like you where looking at put lots of hard disks in and install freenas and use that as a Iscsi nas box.
Toby
The OS directly on the server is VMware ESXi (bare metal install). The OS's of the virtual machines running on it are a mixture of Linux and Windows. That server with 8GB RAM is happily handling 5 VMs currently and will take a lot more as they're fairly low-usage.Quote:
Originally Posted by duxbuz
Booting from USB because it was just a bit easier. I bought the bundle deal from ServersPlus which was that server with 4GB RAM (bought an extra 4GB) and a USB stick with ESXi already installed. I did a fresh install of ESXi anyway, but as ESXi does so few read/writes the USB stick will probably work out more reliable and easier to replace than the internal HDD. I can swap out a cloned replacement USB stick with no issues, whereas if I was using HDDs I'd probably want them mirrored in RAID1.
I said I'm using a SAN for storage, but as it's NFS it is more accurately NAS.
SAN = block-level (iSCSI)
NAS = file-level (CIFS, NFS)
I've got a Sun 7410 Unified Storage system which does iSCSI, CIFS, NFS, HTTP, FTP, etc. NFS is the most flexible and gives best performance with VMware in my experience using this hardware.
Having shared storage (be it iSCSI SAN or NFS NAS) isn't so much of an issue with ESXi as it runs as a standalone host (I'm talking about the free version of ESXi here), but eventually I'll have a pool of ESX servers using shared storage. In this way, if an ESX host fails another ESX host which has access to the same shared storage can automatically take over. If you're unfamiliar with the concept, Google 'VI3 Demo' and watch the old VMware video. It basically takes your downtime in the case of a server failure from a few days to about two minutes. With VMware Fault Tolerance you can get that down to less than a second of downtime (there's a couple of limitations).
As far as your 'expensive' comment goes, it depends. I was looking at £100k+ for a NetApp solution. My Sun box is the top-end model and came in at less than a third of the NetApp quote and is still bigger and more powerful. Sun, EMC, Dell, etc. all do cheaper solutions, and you could even build your own SAN/NAS using OpenFiler or FreeNAS for the same price as a decent PC.
Hope this helps,
Chris
People boot from usb because when it was ESXi 3.5 it didn't support booting from the hard disk but did from USB (and had an internal connector).
That too! Obviously ESX/ESXi needs to be able to see the local storage in order to install to it, and it doesn't have drivers for all onboard storage. vSphere 4.0 improved this a lot, but in quite a few cases USB storage was more likely to have drivers than the SATA controller.Quote:
Originally Posted by DMcCoy
Chris
HP at one point apparently where selling servers with ESXI installed on a chip on the motherboard!
Yeah, I'm not sure if VMware are still pushing the 'ESXi Embedded' product but I guess it has it's place. If you're buying dedicated VMware hosts, might as well keep things as simple as possible. If I was installing a huge ESX server farm then I'd rather not have to deal with failing HDDs or putting in USB sticks! ;)
So basically a NAS is a machine with 1 gig NIC in and 2 or more drives for RAID1?
Thats it?
All read/write is over the wire?
Thanks