(Also, I'm assuming the DRAC does its remote-media trick at the firmware level and does not involve the host operating system, which is a big assumption.) So the question is, how is that handled under ESX 3i on a "supported" DELL server? Is all the critical stuff just standard ACPI or is it some kind of DELL proprietary interrupt? ESX 3u must have such built-in support for the DELL machines that it officially supports and so one can wonder if that DELL support would also work with the BMC on the PE 2800, or if it would merely treat these great machines like another white box and force us to rely on the DRAC for all monitoring (rather than OpenManage) and deal with the BMC/DRAC hard-crashing the operating system during catastrophic failures.
#Mac pro tower vs rack software
What happens when the BMC on the PE 2800 throws an event like "it's getting hot in here" or the DRAC reports "shutdown host operating system" or the PERC reports "another one ( UltraSCSI 15K drive ) bites the dust"? Normally the CPU would be booted into RHEL or W2K3 and DELL's software on those operating systems would detect the event and possibly shutdown the system in an orderly manner (or at least write to a log file somewhere). Does this mean it is not going to work at all, or that VMware doesn't give any guarantees (because tests simply didn't take place, for example)? If ESXi is not going to work, will VMware server be able to do what we want? My question: will ESXi run on our machine? I checked the compatibility list and ESX should be okay, but there's nothing about ESXi. Someone tipped me about ESXi, so I'd like to try that. I've looked at several virtualisation techniques, both XEN and KVM are impossible for our situation. This machine is used for our internal business, so stability is a must. We'd like to run 2 virtual hosts (small start to see if the machine can manage it, it doesn't have VT-capable CPUs), one Win2003, one Linux.
I've already upgraded the RAM to 5GB, so that shouldn't be a problem. Situation: I've been given the assignment to get more out of our Dell PowerEdge 2800 than just the Win2003 we used to run on it. First post on the VMware forums, a 'hi' to all for this and all my future postings