Mike Trello’s Technology Musings
Home lab, virtualization, servers, storage, networking and whatever technology I’m tinkering with.
Recent Articles
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Enable Tech Support Mode on ESXi 4.1
Tech Support Mode Back when I first installed VMware’s ESXi on my machine, the method for enabling SSH on it required you to have physical access to the machine so you could view/interact with the console. You had to see the output from the ESXi Server. There were six steps. After I upgraded to ESXi…
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Upgrading from ESXi 4.0 to 4.1
Introduction In July VMware released a new version of vSphere client and ESXi. I finally got around to seeing what is new in 4.1. Many of the new or enhanced features either did not impact me, or required vCenter (read: $$$$). However, there were some excellent features that did catch my eye: Performance and Scalability…
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PassMark Hard Drive Ratings
Hard drive ratings As an addendum to the PassMark CPU Benchmark post, I decided to go back and look up the ratings of my home drives currently in service, to see how they compare to one another. Not wanting to spend too much time locating all the drive models, I only included the drives ordered…
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Upgrading my home network to gigabit
This time around I wanted to briefly discuss my network upgrade from 100Mbs wired to 1000Mbs, and to direct wiring more of the machines. This was a little project from this Spring. Upgrading my home network I had been running a basic wireless G 100Mbs router for a number of years. It served its purpose…
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Installing ESXi without destroying the datastore
Installing ESXi without destroying the datastore I was perusing some ESXi links when I discovered an interesting thread in the VMware Community Discussion forums. The post discusses how you might install ESXi onto an existing drive that contains a datastore, without destroying the datastore. I could see this as a potential lifesaver down the road.…
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PassMark CPU Benchmarks
CPU Comparisons While researching CPUs for the ESXi Server, one of the sites I hit for information was the PassMark site. This site has a wealth of data comparing almost any CPU, video card or hard drive available… or previously available. They claim over 200,000 CPUs and 200,000 video cards benchmarked. It was very helpful…
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My ESXi box: Part 2- ESXi installation
Review In part one of the ESXi build I covered researching compatible hardware for the VMware machine. The post ended with an assembled PC. This post will cover the installation of ESXi 4.0 on the machine, the vSphere client, and the creation of a datastore. Format the Hard drive(s) Something that I forgot to mention…
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My ESXi box: Part 1- The Hardware
Overview The past 18 months or so, I had been playing around with Sun’s VirtualBox on my primary machine. It allowed me to test out various Linux flavors, and work with open source tools not necessarily available for the host OS, Windows XP. The host hardware was sufficient to run two virtual machines at a…
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OpenFiler within ESXi
Introduction My home network has an ESXi machine I built earlier this year. Dealing with a SAN at the office made me want to enjoy some of the same luxuries at home as well. OpenFiler is a free, open source SAN Server, and is quite well thought of, so I thought it would be worth…
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My first post!
This is my first attempt at a blog, although I have been on the web for a number of years. I’ve run ArcadeCab.com for the past seven years, which details several arcade cabinet builds of mine and others. You might have run across it if you’ve ever Googled for MAME or related topics. You’ll always…