I need to experiment with ldap for a site I manage, and wondered if vmware would be a good way to go for some testing.
My current server is RHEL3, which is getting dated, and I think that I should refresh this server entirely in the move to ldap. We need to have an ldap server for publishing email addresses for a VPN for a nursing home that the upstream can harvest and we can browse to send confidential patient records.
RHEL3 prollie won't cut it, so I'm considering moving to CentOS5.
If I get a nice working test environment working, I wondered about running the server on VMWare, because the hardware will likely need to be refreshed in 2 years anyways. Copying the vmware file and the data to a new server would make for a fast upgrade.
Any feedback on what I am attempting to do here? Any other recommendations on how I should tackle this?
Currently I'm using Samba 3 with passdb. It's nothing fancy, but it works. We have about 20 XP machines here.
The server also hosts mail as well.
Thom Paine wrote:
I need to experiment with ldap for a site I manage, and wondered if vmware would be a good way to go for some testing.
Yes.
My current server is RHEL3, which is getting dated, and I think that I should refresh this server entirely in the move to ldap. We need to have an ldap server for publishing email addresses for a VPN for a nursing home that the upstream can harvest and we can browse to send confidential patient records.
RHEL3 prollie won't cut it, so I'm considering moving to CentOS5.
If I get a nice working test environment working, I wondered about running the server on VMWare, because the hardware will likely need to be refreshed in 2 years anyways. Copying the vmware file and the data to a new server would make for a fast upgrade.
Should work if you can afford the performance hit of VMware overhead. Would probably want to use bridged networking.
Any feedback on what I am attempting to do here? Any other recommendations on how I should tackle this?
Currently I'm using Samba 3 with passdb. It's nothing fancy, but it works. We have about 20 XP machines here.
The server also hosts mail as well.
Does not seem like a big load. Pretty easy to give it a try. You can even DL a CentOS VMware pre-built image for Player and bypass installation:
http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/ http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/
Phil
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 1:10 PM, Phil Schaffner Philip.R.Schaffner@nasa.gov wrote:
Does not seem like a big load. Pretty easy to give it a try. You can even DL a CentOS VMware pre-built image for Player and bypass installation:
http://www.thoughtpolice.co.uk/vmware/ http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/
For a CentOS VMware pre-built image, look no further ...
http://people.centos.org/tru/vmware/
Akemi
Akemi Yagi wrote: ...
For a CentOS VMware pre-built image, look no further ...
Akemi,
Did not know about those, and can't find any links from the CentOS home page or the Wiki. Am I missing something, or are these TODO items for Johnny and the docs team? Would be nice to see them prominently "advertised".
Phil
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Phil Schaffner Philip.R.Schaffner@nasa.gov wrote:
Akemi Yagi wrote: ...
For a CentOS VMware pre-built image, look no further ...
Akemi,
Did not know about those, and can't find any links from the CentOS home page or the Wiki. Am I missing something, or are these TODO items for Johnny and the docs team? Would be nice to see them prominently "advertised".
Phil
These vmware images have been built, maintained and provided by Tru Huynh. I don't think it's been officially announced. I agree this should be more advertised.
Akemi
Akemi Yagi wrote:
These vmware images have been built, maintained and provided by Tru Huynh. I don't think it's been officially announced. I agree this should be more advertised.
As long as its clearly highlighted that they wont / dont work with Xen... I suppose they are not vmware specific either, since they help under kvm / xVM / qemu as well. So, changing the name to kernel-vmware might not be a good idea either.
On Thu, 30 Oct 2008, Akemi Yagi wrote:
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 2:17 PM, Phil Schaffner Philip.R.Schaffner@nasa.gov wrote:
Akemi Yagi wrote: ...
For a CentOS VMware pre-built image, look no further ...
Akemi,
Did not know about those, and can't find any links from the CentOS home page or the Wiki. Am I missing something, or are these TODO items for Johnny and the docs team? Would be nice to see them prominently "advertised".
These vmware images have been built, maintained and provided by Tru Huynh. I don't think it's been officially announced. I agree this should be more advertised.
I guess this should become part of the virtualization SIG. Maybe a good listing of different virtualization projects on the SIG page would be a good start ?
I don't know if Daniel is still involved, but I am sure that help from others would be very helpful !
Dag Wieers wrote:
I guess this should become part of the virtualization SIG. Maybe a good listing of different virtualization projects on the SIG page would be a good start ?
yes, that sounds good.
I don't know if Daniel is still involved, but I am sure that help from others would be very helpful !
Daniel did say he will keep an eye on things, and Tim has offered to help run the VirtSIG. so yes, there should be traction there at the moment. I know Tru and Akemi are also active there.
Am 30.10.2008 um 20:37 schrieb Thom Paine:
I need to experiment with ldap for a site I manage, and wondered if vmware would be a good way to go for some testing.
You can use either VMware Server 2.0 or VMware VI3i, provided your hardware is supported.
VMware Server needs some OS as base (CentOS5 should do well), but 3i goes on the bare metal - it's based on RHEL, too, though. 4 GB of RAM is the absolute minimum. I wouldn't virtualize all storage. Use a separate server and NFS mount all storage from that, if you can (maybe Samba is the exception - SMB- exporting NFS-mounted stuff makes Samba even more tricky than it already is). But the less disk-I/O you've got to virtualize, the higher the overall performance you can yield. You can virtualize mail, but only if it doesn't do much I/O. Else it will be painfully slow. What's your storage? How do you plan to backup stuff?
CentOS is not officially supported by VMware (probably never will). If you have a problem, you're on your own. And VMware is not open-source.
But I'm not sure if there's actually anyting in the market that is better than VMware (for full virtualization).
Rainer
Rainer Duffner wrote:
VMware Server needs some OS as base (CentOS5 should do well), but 3i goes on the bare metal - it's based on RHEL, too, though.
ESX is not based on linux at all. ESX(not ESXi) includes a service console that is based off of RHEL-3 though that is for management only, virtualization runs entirely within the hypervisor which is transparent to the user.
There is also a linux compatibility layer I believe for drivers.
ESXi did away with the service console concept almost entirely.
nate
nate wrote:
ESX is not based on linux at all. ESX(not ESXi) includes a service console that is based off of RHEL-3 though that is for management only, virtualization runs entirely within the hypervisor which is transparent to the user.
I've always been curious, in ESX, what manages the physical IO devices, what provides the actual hardware drivers for things like fiberchannel cards, network adapters, and so forth?
does ESX have all its own direct hardware support?
On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 08:59:46PM -0700, John R Pierce enlightened us:
nate wrote:
ESX is not based on linux at all. ESX(not ESXi) includes a service console that is based off of RHEL-3 though that is for management only, virtualization runs entirely within the hypervisor which is transparent to the user.
I've always been curious, in ESX, what manages the physical IO devices, what provides the actual hardware drivers for things like fiberchannel cards, network adapters, and so forth?
does ESX have all its own direct hardware support?
Yes, which is why it runs on such limited hardware.
Matt
John R Pierce wrote:
does ESX have all its own direct hardware support?
Yes it does. You shall be OK if you want to go for branded hardware from Sun, Dell, HP, IBM etc. But for the whitebox PC, it is quite (and sometimes costly) to get the right combination. My best combo are now : a. get the Intel based system, C2D b. with ICH7 or above I/O controller for SATA disk c. get the Intel EtherExpress 1000BaseT OEM d. Put the RAM at least 4GB e. Get the non Gigabyte motherboard, since their motherboard is having problem to boot from USB, if you want to try the ESX 3.5i, instead of ESX 3.5 f. Get the ESX 3.5 or ESX 3.5i, since they can use the SATA disk for the VMFS storage, or provide another iSCSI target for that.
-
Akemi Yagi -
Dag Wieers -
John R Pierce -
Karanbir Singh -
Matt Hyclak -
nate -
Niki Kovacs -
Phil Schaffner -
Rainer Duffner -
The_Eye_In_The_Sky -
Thom Paine