the birdhouse in my soul

When you're shopping for ESX servers to build your next production cluster, you know where to look. The hardware compatibility lists at vmware.com are frequently updated, and contain everything you need to know. But what about test labs ? When you don't care too much about "is it supported" but rather ask yourself "does it work" and "can I buy something cheaper" ? I asked myself the same questions when I built my own testlab. And this was my choice: 2 identical PCs, equipped with MSI MS7345 motherboard Q6600 intel CPU 8 GB of RAM (four times 2 GB) PCI Promise SATA 300 TX2plus 80 GB sata harddrive (smallest I could get) a dual port Intel gigabit card Add a third PC, similar but with more diskspace, running CentOS 5 with IET as an iSCSI server, and you get a 19 GHz, 16 GB VI3 cluster with several hundred GB storage space. Perfect for testing, and without losing an arm and a leg paying for them.

So you're running the new ESX 3.5 update 2. And you want to try the new EVC feature on your cluster. And you've found it under "edit settings" on your cluster object... And then VirtualCenter refuses to enable it for you, because there is still at least one VM powered on in the cluster. Of course there is, because your VirtualCenter runs in a VM, in that same cluster. Catch-22 ? Well, getting round this is a bit weird, but nevertheless possible. Here's what I did on my two-node test cluster: Step one: you evacuate one ESX host in your cluster. You put it in maintenance mode, and move it out of the cluster, right under your datacenter object. Two: manually migrate (VMotion via drag-and-drop for example) your VirtualCenter VM (running on a host in the cluster) to the host that is now outside the cluster. Do this with all other VMs that were still running in the cluster. Three: enable EVC on your cluster. This now works, because the cluster doesn't contain any ru...