Hey guys,
when moving to a larger and modern PC architecture, I simply had one PC with no usage – yet. So I seeked out for a good reason to put it into another 4U case and add it to my rack. My primary server (AMD64EE, 6TB RAID5 Areca storage, 4GB RAM & Debian Lenny) is pretty nice and ready for new challenges like mt-daapd, smb, afp, nfs & apache2 of course with MySQL and PHP.
My wife would like to test the new 7 RC on her notebook. She’s currently using Vista 32bit Ultimate and pretty happy with it and does not want to move the well installed version into trash. Buying a 2nd harddisk is also no option, because changing the harddisk often is annoying and unsatisfying. One option would be to use a tool like Acronis DiskDirector and split the 120GB HD into two parts to install 7 on the new one. Nice, but it could be nicer.
A few weeks ago, my colleague from Zürich told me about the VMWare ESXi server which is available for free. He said it’s pretty cool and fast. VMWare ESXi let you install a 32MB Linux on the primary disk. On top of that, of course you need a large storage if you want to add some images and a fast NIC. I thought I was prepared for this. Installing the system was pretty easy and just a thing of a few minutes.
First, I tried to install it on an AHCI volume which is attached to my ICH9 onboard controller of my Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3 mainboard. This works fine, doing the first boot, I got no option to change the IP of the machine. It was set to “0.0.0.0 (STATIC)”. After reading a bit through the manual, I found out, that the NIC is not supported. Ok – no problem. I’ve laying around a bunch of different NICs with different chipsets. So I installed a Realtek 8169S card – a Gigabit PCI card and booted the machine. For my surprise, the harddisk was no bootable. Pretty strange. I installed the system again with no success. The first boot worked, the NIC was not detected and I was exactly where I started before. The next card I tried was a D-Link DLG10028C Gigabit PCI card – exactly the same issues including that I had to reinstall the system again. To make it short, with my 3com Gigabit PCI card, I had the issues. Again, the system didn’t boot from the harddisk when I’d rebooted it once. First boot works like a charme, second fails.
Seems like VMWare expects something special like an Intel chipset card to work. Unfortunaly, I’ve no idea where my Intel Desktop Pro 1000MT PCI Gigabit card is, I searched on my hardware stock in the basement, without success. That was my quick try to use the VMWare ESXi and I’m not sure (more because of the boot issues than because of the NIC problems) if I’ll give it a new chance. Another big question is, if I could use OS X on this – I don’t think so.
Any ideas to solve this issue are more than welcome!
Ciao
Dennis
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