Comments on: Running VMware ESX Server 2.5

By: neozeed

neozeed — Mon, 26 Nov 2018 01:50:44 +0000

In reply to human being. Damn, those Russians!

By: human being

human being — Sun, 25 Nov 2018 20:41:26 +0000

In reply to neozeed. Yup its on vetusware

By: neozeed

neozeed — Mon, 19 Nov 2018 01:07:24 +0000

In reply to Darkstar. I never was a fan of GSX, I should look if I have a copy of it still. At one point we had tonnes of it, prior to ESX in dev. Although I was more of a virtual server guy at the time, doing VS+Double take was pretty neat, but vmotion and making real clusters was the killer app. I've seen the ISO set I have pop up on vetus once.

By: Darkstar

Darkstar — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 18:21:53 +0000

Nice! Care to share where you found that ancient ESX/VCenter version? Oldest I have is 3.0.1 (https://archive.org/details/VMwareInfrastructure3-ESXServerV3.0.1)

I’d love to try out the earlier ones. GSX server too, haven’t found a copy of that so far…

By: neozeed

neozeed — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 08:15:54 +0000

In reply to David K.

Lol did that after VMware 3, the guy who did the licensing was let go, and the renewal fell through.

VMware was 100% unhelpfull, so id moved everything to proxmox. It was a great fit, until both VMware dropped prices with 5, and we were bought out.

Get machines vanilla, and pre-load para virtual drivers, and for the most part you’ll be fine. I didn’t have any license issues, just MS cluster issues with shared disks… Hidden tags and shit on the volumes.

Others, yeah it works great!

By: David K

David K — Sun, 18 Nov 2018 05:17:47 +0000

Man, I got so fed up with trying to migrate a ESXi 4.0 server to anything newer (it had apparently been migrated from 3.x, so had some wacky partitions that 4.1 and newer refuse to touch).
I ended up getting a monsterous Dell R910 with 512GB of ram and 4x 8 core Xeons to replace the aging HP DL 360 (not sure the gen) . 20 Windows VMs and another 20 Linux containers in Proxmox VE, with tons of resources to spare. I’m on to building my third 16 drive RAID6 array now, with 16 2.5″ SAS drives internal to the R910, 16 3.5″ FC drives in a NetApp enclosure, and doubling down with a second 16 bay NetApp enclosure. Its amazing how cheap they have gotten, I ended up getting a second R910 to play with at home. The downside being when things act up, it can be almost impossible to decipher what really is wrong and Dell doesn’t share the service manual for it either.
All that to say, the old ESXi 4.0 is finally getting migrated off over the Christmas break when I can kick everyone else out for the three days to extract the .vmdk off the broken ESXi box and migrate it over to Proxmox VE, fix all the drivers and hopefully not hit any activation nonsense on our legacy database…