Butuz

You may not be intending to challenge Pixar any time soon, but just bear in mind that even a cheapo Cannon digi camera @ 640x480 will create several hundred megabyte avi files for just half an hours video. Your hard drive will be a much much much bigger bottleneck than your graphics card, and personally I would dump the fancy graphics card and spend more on muptiple drives. If you were intending to challenge Pixar - then yes you would need to spend lots of money over and above an on board vga card. But your not, and I recon for your intended use the Core i7 will give you all the performance you need, literally as quick as your hard drive is able to read and write (or both at the same time god forbid). Butuz

One thing that is very important for video editing is disk performance. I think on your spec above the single disk configuration will be the weakest link. At the least it would be better to have one disk for o/s and editing cache, and one disk for saving finalised videos too. Perferably you would use several disks in a raid 0 config for editing speed along with further storage to archive off finshed videos. Depends on your budget I suppose. Butuz

What is the ambient temperatuture in your room? If its 30 or more then yes you just need to get air con!! If ambient is low (under 25) it could indicate a problem with the cpu fan / heatsink itself. Butuz

Yeh trying from the build area. Not having much luck at the moment!!! Andrew

Anyone Tried to get an Optiplex 780 building on CC3??? I am having lots of trouble with drivers - no matter what I do with GFX/SOUND/LAN etc drivers it starts throwing up errors when it tries to join the domain. The network card is working however as if I log on with Setup user it has the network connnection right and can even get to Setup's my documents. Heeeelp! Butuz

Have you been staking snapshots of both the servers? Snapshots use up extra space. Butuz

Yeh I put my thin clients down as workstations. Butuz

Haha!!! I love the dry humour. I agree with you thats why I run just Windows 2003 Terminal Server's here. Virtualised terminal severs + a decent network inftrastucture + zero clients like Axel M80f = WIN! I've done all the calculations and it is much cheaper to buy outright, much cheaper to run based on energy usage, much cheaper in terms of support and maintenance and much cheaper in terms of a replacement/upgrade strategy. Butuz

Either 16 x 146GB 10K SAS or 16 x 300GB 10K SAS. 2 Disks are lost to the operating system though so you only get 14 available for data. It's a shame that they do not offer 15k disks but there must be a reason. Always remember that the number of disks is just as important than the type. I'd take 14 x 10k drives over 5 x 15k drives any day. Butuz

Yes as said above basically your Realtek card is not suporrted by ESX. There is no way to make it work. You will have to pop a new card in there and Intel are a good bet! Butuz

I would reccomend a Sun 7110 for your VM storage over NFS providing you only need 2 or 4TB of VM Storage. Yes it's only 10krpm SAS but 14 of them, 8GB RAM and Fishworks's genious ensures one super fast storage device. If you need more storage you may have to look at something else. Butuz

So what happens to your VM's if one of your physical servers fail? They all go down whilst your SAN sits there happy as larry with it's 99.999% uptime keeping all your data safe (but inaccesible)? Sounds like strange advice to me. Butuz

I thought Apples did not need technicians? Everyone seems to say theyre so reliable. Butuz

If that is true then it is shocking! I always take journo's with several pinches of salt though. Butuz

Done! Maybe could do with an options between 1GB and 10GB (e.g I have 4 x 1GB trunked on the backbone for 4GB) Butuz

How old?!!!!!!!!!!! Happy birthday!!!! Butuz

The power supply's in them do Butuz

He's right! Only transfer those rolls if that DC is totally completeley and utterly dead and will be thrown in the bin. If on theother hand that DC is gonna be repaired and will come back up at some stage in the near future then you will end up in trouble! Butuz

Wow. 100k on one room. I am jealous. More like 100k every 5 years for the whole school here! Butuz

Phew I've just sat down! My poor bad feet! Butuz

8.30????!! Slacker!! Butuz

3 hosts sounds like it will be perfect - I wish I could have got 3 hosts but the budget was not there and had to go for 2. You using VMWare? I too am in the process of creating new vServers for everything. Having one service / one app per member server is a really good idea in terms of reliaiblity! Only cost is a 2k3/2k8 standard licence? Cheap! Butuz

Hmm it would be interesting to know if when you reconfigured the pool it showed 14 drives available for config or 16? It should always show 14 (2 reserved for O/S) so if it shows 16 available for data - DON'T CREATE THE POOL! Instead create a support bundle and get in touch with Sun methinks! Butuz

Which is exactly why we are in this situation. Butuz

Halfords?? Butuz