In playing with the cabinet I received a while ago, I thought it was time to fill it up and use it. I was able to get a couple of servers from a friend at a really good price. I got the servers a few months ago and they have been sitting under the couch collecting dust, until last weekend when I racked what I could.

After re-arranging the room to be able to use the cabinet and get to the servers I only had to buy RAM for one of them, and that is so that I can install VMware ESX4i on it.

The plan is simple, now that I have all this power, lets do something with it.

If you notice, I am going to try to integrate a windows 2008 server into a windows 2003 network. The main point of this exercise is to see what I can do with “scrap” hardware. Each ESX host is limited by the amount of RAM that can be used, in my case 4GB at once. The second limitation on this is drive space. I only have 200GB total space available, and that is because I want to keep my costs extremely low and not buy drives. How can I do this without buying the operating systems? Well since this is a lab I am not going to pirate the OSes, I am going to download them. For free. Microsoft allows you to download the operating systems as either a Virtual Disk or a limited 180 day trial. Since my tests and wants are going to go less than 180 days this is a good option. For the storage backend I am going to be using OpenFiler because it can do it all, at a very low cost. Depending on how well OpenFiler works, I might go out and but 4 1TB drives and setup a RAID array with it later.

Comments are welcome on this post and I will keep an update running here as for how well it works out, but until next time space cadets

--Stephen