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Fun With Virtualization (pt. 2)
This is an addendum to the previous post. After having things reasonably set up, but unhappy with some performance, I decided to scrap everything and try VMWare ESXi. I wiped the computer and got ESXi installed...then realized that it won't support the Realtek gigabit ethernet card I have in the system.
I've now put Windows Server 2008 back on in the Server Core mode and am running nothing but Hyper-V on it. I think some of my problems were tyring to do too much with the base OS, and if I can't have something as light as ESXi, I'll do the best I can with this. Thankfully, I still had my VMs saved, but I decided to rebuild my XP one because it was too slow. It was converted from an old desktop I had last year and needed to be dumped. Both the Server 2008 and XP VMs are working fine.
My Drobo however...I'm still trying to diagnose what's going on with it.
Fun with virtualization
Part one of my home computing infrastructre is done. I am moving from the free VMWare Server to Hyper-V on Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta (thanks to my Technet subscription). VMWare Server is nice, but a little slow. Hyper-V is something I've wanted to play with for a while, but I was also considering VMWare ESXi, which is a free version of their enterprise ESX server. I settled on Hyper-V moved everything off my server onto my Drobo.
Increasing max capacity on Drobo (or how my network learned to hate me)
My wonderful wife got me a 1.5TB drive for my Drobo for Christmas. Currently the little storage robot has 3 500GB drives configured for a max capacity of 4TB. When I got the device, I thought that it'd be longer until the larger drives came down in price and figured it'd be enough. Boy, was I wrong. that 1.5TB drive was around $100 when we got it. The 500GB drives were around the same price in June when I got the drobo. Hard drive prices are plummeting, so I figured that I'd reconfigure the Drobo for the current max of 16TB now while I had the chance. It'll be a long time before I can fill that up...right?
Bookmark pruning
It's a new year, so I felt like it was time to do some major housecleaning on my systems.I started with my bookmarks. It might not seem like much, but I've been carrying the same bookmarks.html file from system to system since I first started using Netscape in 96-97. It's gone from Netscape to IE, with some time spent in Opera along the way, and currently lives in Firefox. I've kept it in sync on my various computers with Google Browser Sync, and now with Foxmarks. There were a ton of dead sites in there, as well as many, many duplicate entries. I figure the dupes are from problems importing and exporting, as well as when I used browser sync. When I started I had nearly 2000 bookmarks, and now I have under 200.
Next up on my cleaning list is probably my macbook pro which is under 6 months old, but has a lot of junk on it. I'm also working on my Drobo, trying to get everything off it so I can increase the max capacity on it. It's got 715GB used out of 1TB available, and I got another big drive for Christmas to put in there.