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VMware Lab updates

My newest gear, a HP DL380 G3,  is doing great I have managed to create 4 guests for it 3 of them are running Windows 2k3 server. Its making a great test ground for new applications including HP SIM 6(Insight Manager)  yes it's a pig it needs 2.5GB of ram to install smoothly with MS SQL express on board. An old copy of Citrix Meta frame I had laying around which is coming in handy since VMWare infrastructure client is a windows only application, and my Windows laptop is out for repairs. And my main desktop is now a Sunray running  off a blade 1500. So I added VMware Infrastructure client  as an application and installed the Solaris Citrix clients and it works very smoothly. I tried installing the Citrix client on opensolaris, but even after adding the necessary libraries it just kept exiting with an out of memory error, and the box has 5GB of ram and 7GB swap partition so I don't think that is the real reason, perhaps I will look into the issue more later.

GNS3 rocks but I think it too much for the HP ESXi, even after I tuned it using "idle PC" and modified the Linux hires clock back to 100hz instead of the default 1000hz, it was still eating up over 4000mhz of the 6400hz the system has to offer, and this is just with two routers being simulated . I need to look into what is the least CPU intensive routers to emulate that have all the routing protocols.

QMail toaster is my email server and that is working great amazingly lightweight for the amount of email  I  have, it uses  250hz and 114MB of ram running on centos 4.
Other things that I'm thinking about creating guests for is an Oracle database probably oracle 9 or something just a toy, don't need it often but every so often I think about playing with Oracle, yes I'm a geek!

Still thinking about adding more memory to the server, 3GB was a good place to start, but I would like to upgrade to 5GB, maybe more if I can find a source of cheap memory for it, I hear they are being carted off to resellers by the truck load so it shouldn't be too hard perhaps one of my readers will give me a great source for the memory for it.

 

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