Thursday, February 07, 2008

Meet Mindy ...

So, meet Mindy. She's my VMware Server host that's become the cornerstone of my digital office / media / life. I started building her about a year ago after having a couple near hard drive failures on my older systems (morella, ultra60, firewall and plumb). Also, at about the same time, VMware started giving away their VMware Server product, so I started thinking seriously about server consolidation.

The end result was Mindy, an Intel Core2 Duo-based server running Linux and VMware. For you tech geeks, here are the "vitals"

  • Antec P180 case
  • Antec Earthwatts 500 watt power supply
  • Intel DG965RYCK motherboard
  • 4x Corsair 1Gb DDR RAM (originally 2x)
  • 2 Western Digital 500Gb SATA drives
  • OpenSuSE 10.2 32-bit Linux
  • VMware Server 1.0.4

Then running on top of it are a number of virtual machines, including (but not limited to):

  • Pesto: Ubuntu 7.0.4 server (file server, music server, Subversion server)
  • Bobby: Windows XP Professional (iTunes podcatcher, e-mail client, etc)
  • Morella: Slackware 8.1 (domain controller, imaged from the original machine)
  • DrPlotz: OpenBSD 4.0 SSH server

It took about a week to put together, but she's now an indispensable part of my life. And to make thins even better, I took what was a 600 watt power budget (at least according to my UPS) down to 185 watts and taken the wind tunnel sound of the old systems down to a much more manageable volume. She's still a bit noisy (need better fans and maybe a better power supply), but for now, it's way better.

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