28 March, 2009

VMware Studio and its host hardware

I've been building appliances on an AMD phenom 9850 quad core with 8GB RAM of late. This system has been running Ubuntu 8.04 amd64 and my builds took about 45 minutes when my local Aberdeen NAS was behaving.

This week while attempting to upgrade to Ubuntu's Jaunty the software raid mirroring (!) fell over and that build box crashed. It was really strange since grub settings were saved correctly on one drive in the mirror set but not the other.

So I blew it all away and installed CentOS 5.2 x86_64 [ 5.3? eh? before xmas *cough* ;) ] ..And put VMware Server 1.0.8 on there without installation headaches and hey, my builds are down to 26 minutes. Fantastic improvement.

I may use Ubuntu again as a deskside workstation but never on a server. Seriously flakey upgrades. RHEL/CentOS has the reliability win for now.

I know VMware Server 2 is gaining popularity but from what I know VMware Studio still only supports Server 1.x. Would love to see ESX support as I have a farm of cool AMD Shanghai boxes now.

I've an Intel Nehelem i720 system on order. 12GB ddr3 and 4 sata drives in a stripe set while install sources will continue to reside on the NAS. I like to keep build hosts as stateless as possible. Studio logs build times in both its debug and verbose logs and I'll post a follow-up to that once the new box is online. I'm guessing 20 minutes, will see..

For home I have an AMD Shanghai 720 on order. Don't know if I'll get VMware Server running on that unless someone asks me to. That system will replace a pre-release first-gen opteron 2ghz that is more than 5 years old. Wow. I miss getting free & early access to AMD and Intel CPU samples.

For the record the Aberdeen NAS runs Windows and absolutely sucks serving NFS. Avoid them if you have any Linux/Unix/OSX infrastructure.