Thought I would give installing Vmware’s Eval of Esx 3 Virtualization software on 2 of these old servers just to see how it worked.
These servers used to run the older 2.5 version pretty okay considering they are not the state of the art machines thesedays.
But Esx 3 is much more picky about the hardware it will install on and on the install cd , it would not find any of the hard disks in the machines to install on.
Did not surprise me about the Compaq Proliant 6500 machine as it has only 4 x 550mhz xeons cpu’s and 4 gig of memory.
However did think the DL760 g1 with 8 X 900MHZ 2meg Xeon cpu’s might have been okay, but ESX 3 does not support the Compaq integrated scsi array in the machine.
So just for a laugh and curious, I am upgrading both machines with a COMPAQ 171383-001 SMART ARRAY 5300, which is supported, not sure if this will work as Esx 3, states a min of a 1500MHZ cpu.
Installing this card in the older Proliant 6500 should be no prob, as it is just whip out the old card and run the cables onto the new card.
But doing this in the DL760 is somewhat harder as you need to get hold of a new io pcb to fit on the back of the orginal hard disk cage with long enough cables to reach where you slot in the pci smart array card is now.
so parts I had to get for this machine were:-
171383-001 SMART ARRAY 5300
And 2 of these boards:-
146447-002 COMPAQ SMART ARRAY BYPASS CABLE KIT.
Shall update this as to whether it worked or not on Esx 3 soon.
Even if it does not, these should help speed up disk access on these still quite useable servers 😉
Have fun
Graham
