Feelin' ESXi

One of the ridiculous pieces of computing gear I’ve got is an HP ProLiant ML350 G6. This is for-real server gear, with (optional) redundant PSUs and remote management and all that nonsense. It began life as a single-CPU 8-thread Xeon E..5620something or other, but which is a first-generation Core architecture based type thing basically, with 4GB RAM and a single 147GB SAS 15k drive. It’s now a dual CPU X5560 (so 24-thread) system with 24GB RAM and 3x240GB Adata 2.5” SFF SSDs. And VMware ESXi 6.7, which is the point here.

Turns out, VMware Fusion on the Mac and Workstation Pro on Windows allow you to manage an ESXi server from your machine. (Manage is kind of a loose term - you can fiddle with VMs but you can’t do any host management stuff without logging into the Web UI or vSphere.) But.. it’s super neat to be able to sit at your Mac laptop, fire up Fusion, and then fire up a Windows 10 VM that’s not on your actual computer. That’s almost like magic. It’s legit like running the VM locally, except your actual computer doesn’t take the hit. (You don’t get the Unity stuff you do with a real local VM, though.) And, what’s also cool is firing up Fusion on the Mac and then Workstation Pro on the Windows PC and controlling the same VM on both systems. Watching the mouse move and stuff on both screens is just kinda neat. Did I mention I’m a huge nerd who thinks things like that are neat? Because if you haven’t gotten the hint by now..

That, plus the additional Docker workflow stuff that Fusion Pro at least gets on macOS, may actually push me into dropping Parallels for VMware. At least with the Docker integration on the macOS side I’d actually be using VMware on a regular basis; I can’t remember the last time I used Parallels at all. Running full VMs on my computer just isn’t a thing I do anymore.

This is just a quick post while I’m in between a number of things. I do plan on writing up a bunch of gibberish on all the upgrades that I did to the ProLiant - I’ve even swapped out the drive backplane at this point! and I still need to put more disks and RAM and the 2nd PSU in it - and the “let’s build some sort of PC cheap” project is about to turn into a “oh, well, here’s an actually good computer” project. But, things for later, and ideally when I’ve got some time to write some stuff for this to present multiple posts as a story type situation. Or work on this at all.

In conclusion, I have the best ping time.

speeds are so last century. the kids these days need latency!

And I actually posted a video to YouTube. (The Sun still rises! And runs Solaris 8! And has the IDPROM I got it!)