VMWare & ESXi are staples in the business sector. I don’t have privilege to play around with that technology at work so I aim to bring it to the home space.
Did you know VMWare’s vSphere hypervisor is free? That’s my ticket to enabling this VMware dream in the home. This is my ticket to running at least two operating systems at the same time and effectively use old hardware.
The operating systems I would like to run are:
- FreeNAS
- Microsoft Windows Server 2012
- Mac OS X Server
The hardware I am planning to run with will be my brother’s old PC.
- Intel Core2Duo E6400 @ 2.13 GHz
- 2 x 1GB DDR2 PC-6400 RAM
- ASUS P5B Wi-Fi/AP motherboard
Those three items are the most significant items because they are the ones that will determine the compatibility and effectiveness of this whole initiative.
Unless the latest version of the hypervisor somehow retroactively made the motherboard’s NIC and storage controller compatible, I will have to perform some customizations OR buy a new compatible storage adapter and NIC card.
Of course the latter will cost me some money but it will allow me to use existing hardware. The most costly option would be to purchase and build new hardware dedicated to this initiative but I think that’s a little overkill.
The easiest option is to forgo VMware and install right on the hardware. I would my brother’s box with RAM and install Windows Server 2012 on it. Then I will use my existing Shuttle ST20G5 home server and install FreeNAS on that. But then what’s the fun in that?
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