Chris Farris

VMWare ESXi 4.0 is out. It has most of what I’ve been wanting in ESXi, in particular IDE support. 4.0 supports SATA drives in the host, and IDE drives and some form of USB in the guest OS. Ever since windows 98, I’ve has a policy of never running anything ending on .0 in a production capacity. I’ve got it running in the lab at work and look forward to putting it through the rounds when I get back from my business trip.

I’m not a big fan of the idea of VMware running on a host OS for production servers. One reason for that is that you have direct access to the VMware data files. You could do something unfortunate, like: `I’m not a big fan of the idea of VMware running on a host OS for production servers. One reason for that is that you have direct access to the VMware data files.

So earlier this week I needed to build a new VMWare server in the lab because the existing VMWare server had a few production instances running on it. Our Lab is mostly hand-me-down hardware and not the best. I didn’t want the VMs I needed to create to impact those legacy production servers. A coworker had installed VMWare Server 2.0 a few months back and we had several issues with it.

http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/ESXi_PXE_install.html For Ubuntu you need the tftpd-hpa package as the install.tgz file is larger than atftp will allow.