Openfiler Question

Hi all,

I bought a used server to have a play around with VmWare ESXi. It didn't come with any scsi drives. I have a laptop with about 100GB free memory which I was thinking of installing openfiler on. I don't know much about it yet. Would I still need to buy a scsi drive and then use the laptop with openfiler as extra storage or is it possible for ESXi to boot from openfiler? Its probably a long shot but wanted to check with you before I splashed out on a drive.

If I do need to buy a drive what would be the minimum size I should get, assuming I can use the extra 100GB on the laptop too.

Thanks for your help.

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Comments

meadIT

You can actually install ESXi on and boot off of a flash drive, assuming your BIOS can boot off of a USB device. I had a T105 server that only had SATA drives and this is how I ran ESXi on it for testing/studying.

toptek

Great, I'll try that. Its a Dell PowerEdge 6800. I'm just using it for studying aswell.

So I'll try booting the server of the flash drive and access the images using openfiler on the laptop.

Thanks.

Zaits

Toptek,

If you are looking to get more storage for ESXi, openfiler will work great for you. If you are unfamiliar with Openfiler or SAN's in general you'll need to do some research, but basically you'll want to connect the laptop to the ESXi server using iSCSI. This is something openfiler supports among many other features. If you have any questions feel free to send me an IM I'll do my best to answer them.

Thanks,

Zaits

astorrs

toptek wrote: »

Great, I'll try that. Its a Dell PowerEdge 6800. I'm just using it for studying aswell.

And for keeping your house warm in the winter. Those things are beasts - ~7U if I recall.

toptek

It a loud piece of kit alright! It a nice neat 4U though

It came at a good price.... I think

4 dual core 3.6ghz processors, 8GB ram. 150 Euro

Will probably only turn it on when Im using it. Need to calculate how much it costs to run.