[tech] 4x Sunfire v20z's from FAHSS

[James Andrewartha]

On Wed, 10 Feb 2010, James French wrote:

> As has been discussed at a couple of meetings (at least one wheel
> meeting and one committee meeting) Arts no longer need our four
> original v20z servers so we're sending them UCCwards.

[MRD] and I had a shot at installing VMWare ESXi 4 and Windows Server 
2008 R2 on one today. The VMWare install went OK, but not much else did:

> What's actually coming:
> 4x Rail kits (and if they get put into the racks without these, I will
> use them on the person responsible).

The rails are too long for all of our racks.

> 2x 36G 7200 rpm SCSI disks
> 2x single port, Qlogic Fibre Channel HBA's (multimode tranceiver built
> into the card)
> 1x double port Qlogic FC HBA (requires SFPs)
> 1x 3 port Firewire card

1x CD-ROM drive

Which makes installing off DVDs kind of hard. It didn't seem we could boot 
the VM from the virtual DVD drive from another computer, so we ended up 
ripping the disc to an .iso and using that, which took half an hour to 
upload to the local storage on the VM.

> All of the boxes have dual Opteron 244's (1.8GHz) with two having 4G

The CPUs are unfortunately revision CG, which makes them just slightly too 
old to work for 64bit guest virtualisation: http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003945

So we were unable to install Windows Server 2008 R2, as it's only 
available in 64bit. We could just install it without virtualisation, but 
the install media is a DVD, so we can't boot from it, and the v20z doesn't 
boot from USB. [JCF] suggested using http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html
as a bootloader for a USB drive with the installer copied to it using
http://www.intowindows.com/how-to-install-windows-7vista-from-usb-drive-detailed-100-working-guide/

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