What The... TECH!

Part 1 of my "Fun with Virtualization... hopefully" blog series.

So I'm virtualizing - what's that even mean? Over the course of this school year, when virtualization became a buzz word and all the cool kids started doing it, and after going to the more.net conference and hearing more and more and more about virtualization, I decided OK, sounds like fun, I'll try it.

I'm not a "throw your eggs in one basket" kind of guy, never have been, never will be. I'm planning on virtualization only to create some "test server" and "extra server" environments. In other words, I'm not going to put key servers together. For example, at my middle school, I have a server that does DNS, Active Directory, and is a Print Server. My new, virtualized server will do the same thing. It also also be a PowerSchool test server, and a backup data server. In more other words, if the box goes down, I'm still only really losing one KEY server.

Here's my server:

IBM System x3550, 2 quad-core xeon e5506 2.13ghz processors, 6gbs of ram, 2 (raid 1) 300gb sata-300 hard drives, and a 3 year on-site warranty.

Here's what I've done so far:

1. Got the server up and running. This entailed upgrading the processor, adding the ram, and getting the raid going.

2. I downloaded ESXi from vmware.com (which is free and requires an account and activation of said account, and the license key). Once I got it downloaded, I burned it to disc.

3. I loaded the disc to the server, and booted up. I then ran the ESXi installer, which was a few enter key, read, enter key, read, enter key... kind of thing. After which, my server was running. I did a few things at the server at this point - configured the root password and got the IP address of the server set up.

4. I then went to MY computer, and went to the IP address of the server via Firefox. From there, I downloaded and installed the vSphere Client... which was a click, click, click kind of thing as well.

5. While the client was installing, I downloaded and read through the vSphere documentation from vmware.com, I also read through the "guest operating system install guide." These docs are under "support."

6. At the client, I entered the IP address, root as the username, and the password I had set up. I then went into Inventory, Config, and set up the datastore.

7. Once the datastore was set up, I went into Inventory, File, New, Virtual Machine, and created my first ever virtual machine... which is going to be a Windows 2008 Server.

8. To get the Windows install to begin, I had to connect to the host CD/DVD drive, which is a button on the console.

9. I'm installing Windows Server 2008 as I type this... and I'm surprised... this has gone too smooth...