Thursday, April 14, 2016

VMWare 6 Home Lab II

I have now successfully cloned VMs and trouble shot my vMotion issue. I have vMotioned a running WinXP VM from one ESX host and back. The WinXP VM is running with minimal performance but does run. HA tests are next. I really would like a system with 32 GB and a Solid State Disk (SSD).


Tuesday, April 5, 2016

VMWare 6 Home Lab

I am working on a VMWare Home Lab running on a old Dell Studio XPS 8100. This is an i5 processor and I have increased the memory to 16 GB.

The approach is nested visualization.I have Win7 installed as the base OS, with VMWare Workstation.
Under Workstation I have created the following virtual machines (VM):

1.) Windows 2008 R2 Active Directory Services and DNS
2.) FreeNAS [Linux]
3.) VMware vCenter Server Virtual Appliance (vCSA) [Linux]
4.) ESXi Host 1
5.) ESXi Host 2

Now with in the nested lab environment I have built a couple of VM's on ESXi host 1:

1.) Damn Small Linux (DSL)
2.) Windows XP

I hope to be able to successfully perform vMotions between the ESXi hosts and then configure and test High Availability (HA) and Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS).

I took several days to build the lab and today I finally got the Windows XP VM setup with VMWare Tools.

I am up against the memory limits of my hardware but it is pretty amazing. We will see how far I can go with this configuration.


Folding Camper Build

I did a wood joint test using Gorilla glue. These joints will be glued an screwed. I will be using some light weight materials so the design is dependent on glue bonds on the wood skin. The test article is made with 1X4's jointed with a 2X2 and skinned on one side using 1/4" luan plywood.



After it is fully cured I will do some load test on it but it appears very  strong.