I Miss My Friends, but I'm Still a Geek.

WoW I’ve been playing, but the rest is because working the swing shift has me really isolated from my friends. They’re working while I’m sleeping or getting ready for work, and they’re finishing their workday when I’m starting mine. Then, when I’m finishing work, they’re long asleep. So yeah, I really miss my friends right now. The good thing is that, unlike 14 million Americans, I actually have a job to go to right now, and I have a roof over my head. I guess that’s a bonus, and I should really keep track of it. One of the things I have had the time to do – besides leveling another toon up to 80 – is work on my MCSE. I haven’t been working on it much over the last two months, but I now have my training platform set up. I set up a VMware ESXi server, and have two VMs running: Win2k3 Server and WinXP Pro. The 2k3 Server VM is the server machine, and the XP VM is the client machine. These are the minimum requirements to get through this training. The cool thing about running this on VMware is that I can have as many machines as I need (within reason) and only have one physical computer to drain power and take up space. <Geek Alert Warning!> In this case, the host system has the following specifications: 1) AMD Athlon X2 5200 Plus CPU running at 2.7ghz 2) 4 GB of PC2-8500 Memory (4x1gb modules) 3) ASUS M3A76-CM Motherboard. 4) Intel Pro100 S network adapter 5) Promise SATA300 TX4 Serial-ATA controller card 6) Two SATA Hard drives </Geek Alert Warning!> The motherboard, CPU, and memory I’ve had for about a month now. I bought it initially to be my server, and was going to play with just that. But then I learned I’d need a client to attach to the domain. I was going to build another machine when a friend of mine whispered in my ear to try ESXi server, and once I learned more about it, I had my heart set on it. Unfortunately for me, when I went to install ESXi, it said it couldn’t find any storage. After doing a number of searches, I gave up figuring that it would be rather cost prohibitive, but would still do a search once a week or so to see if anybody had something cheap that would run this platform. Finally, on Monday, I found a post on the net that detailed somebody’s attempts to get ESXi running using my motherboard. He used the Promise SATA controller I listed above and everything seemed to work fine. The only catch: if you ever need to power the box off, you’ll *need* to have a keyboard connected in order for ESXi to start. This isn’t a problem as I have a few spare keyboards laying around the house. I found one of these cards locally and bought it. I installed it into my machine and realized that I needed an add-on network card. Fortunately I had a spare Intel Pro100 S card laying around. Once that was installed, *bamf!* I got my server up and running! It’s been fun playing with ESXi, and I’m really looking forward to playing with Wink2k3 and learning more about Active Directory and all that. Hopefully I can make a good deal of headway before this job ends. I’m looking forward the end though. I have a vacation planned and I’ll actually be able to start seeing my friends again. That’s all from me for now. Thanks for visiting and Keep Coming Back!!!]]>