New HP ServersMost of our infrastructure is running on ancient Dell 6450 servers with quad PIII 550 processors. We have been looking forward to making the jump to a virtualized environment and the pieces necessary to make that happen have just arrived.

Yesterday, we managed the new servers outfitted with the additional hard drives, memory and processors and then load them into the cabinet. We will use the top two servers to run VMware Server on top of CentOS and the bottom will be our “SAN” running iSCSI Enterprise Target on CentOS.

Specifications:
VMware Servers (both boxes are identical)
HP ML370G5
2 Dual-Core Xeon 2.66 Processors
10GB ECC DDR II SDRAM
HP Smart Array P400/512 Controller
2 72GB 10K SAS

SAN
HP ML370G5
2 Dual-Core Xeon 2.66 Processors
4GB ECC DDR II SDRAM
2 HP Smart Array P400/512 Controller
16 72GB 10K SAS
SATA RAID Controller
2 750GB SATA

We had purchased a 3ware SATA RAID controller for use on the SAN box but it looks like there are memory allocation errors at the BIOS level that neither HP or 3ware have done anything to resolve so we are researching another option.

For the next few days we will just work at getting the cabling tweaked and the hardware tested and verifying driver support in CentOS.