The past few days I’ve been very busy with building my second future proof ESX server. I still had an unused (repaired) Asus V2-P5G33 Bare-Bone, and decided to buy some CPU and memory to get this host up and running. Here’s my shopping list.
- Bare bone Asus V2-P5G33
- Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) Quad CPU Q9400 @ 2.66 GHz
- Memory OCZ 8 GB DDR2-800 Kit
- Storage Samsung HD501LJ 500GB Internal SATA 16MB 7200RPM Hard Drive
- Network Intel® PRO/1000 PT Dual Port Server Adapter
- DVD-ROM Samsung SH-D163
- Diet Coke
The first thing I did was a vMotion migration of a virtual machine with it's disk on an Openfiler Virtual iSCSI Appliance. The second thing I tried was, enabling Fault Tollerence, but that didn’t work because my CPU’s aren’t supported. The third thing I did was enabeling VMware HA.
When you enable a cluster for VMware HA, you specify the number of host failures to be able to recover from. If you specify the number of host failures allowed as 1, VMware HA maintains enough capacity across the cluster to tolerate the failure of one host, so that all running virtual machines on that host can be restarted on remaining hosts. By default, you cannot power on a virtual machine if doing so violates required failover capacity. In the HA Advanced Runtime Info, you can check how many “Available slots” are left, and what resources on “Slot size” takes.
