Dell PowerVault, MD1000, Debian and VMWare

Syngin · #1 10-26-2009, 10:49 AM

Hi guys,

We're evaluating purchasing a Dell powerEdge server and a Power Vault MD1000 for the virtualization of some of our servers.

The host OS on the PowerEdge is going to be Debian (I think I've figured out how to get Dell's OpenManage software running on it)

One of the items I'm unsure of however is OpenManage's ability to set up both ext3 and NTFS partitions on the MD1000. Is doing this easy or does anyone know of any roadblocks I might run into when setting this up? I need the system to support both Linux and Windows virtual machines.

Thanks.

klackenfus · #2 10-26-2009, 11:27 AM

Why would you need to have it support NTFS? What I would do is install Debian, install VMware and then, just run everything in Linux. That's what I have done quite successfully at my work. On my server, I am using CentOS as the host operating system and I have eight VMs running on free VMware server. They are the following:

3 Linux VMs

4 Windows Server 2003 VMs

1 Windows Server 2008 VM

So, my point is, why do you have to support NTFS on the physical server, when it works just fine in a VM?

Oh and much like the Powervault all my VMs reside on a NAS.

Syngin · #3 10-26-2009, 11:42 AM

Ok, maybe I'm just a little confused how I'm going to set this up. I'm going to need about 2 TB available to the Windows 2003 VM as a file server.

I've set up a Power Vault MD 3000 with a windows server before but I'm a little new to virtualization.

Syngin · #4 10-26-2009, 11:49 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by klackenfus

Why would you need to have it support NTFS? What I would do is install Debian, install VMware and then, just run everything in Linux. That's what I have done quite successfully at my work. On my server, I am using CentOS as the host operating system and I have eight VMs running on free VMware server. They are the following:

3 Linux VMs

4 Windows Server 2003 VMs

1 Windows Server 2008 VM

So, my point is, why do you have to support NTFS on the physical server, when it works just fine in a VM?

Oh and much like the Powervault all my VMs reside on a NAS.

Hey, what hardware specs do you have for the VM server you are running?

klackenfus · #5 10-26-2009, 12:00 PM

Currently, I'm running it on an HP xw8400 workstation with 32 gigs of RAM. I have a one terabyte NAS with six drives in a RAID 5. At my house, I have the same hardware but with only 16 gigs of RAM (for now.) I have run it on Poweredge 2950s quite successfully. You just have to make sure you turn on virtualization in the BIOS if you want to make 64 bit VMs.

Syngin · #6 10-26-2009, 12:59 PM

Cool, thanks for the tip.