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Re: [LUG] Software RAID-1 on USB drives

 

Gordon Henderson wrote:
On Wed, 21 Oct 2009, Grant Sewell wrote:

Er, OK. So you're running SBS in a VMWare thingy which is running
on-top of Linux, running on x86 hardware.

No.  I am running SBS in a virtual machine on VMWare ESXi.  VMWare ESXi
runs on the bare metal - it is not an "application" like VirtualBox.

Why aren't you running SBS natively on the hardware without the Linux
bit in the middle?

There is no Linux bit in the middle, and the reason I am running SBS
in a virtual machine is so I can also have a Linux virtual machine
running along side it.  Much and all as I *love* Windows, I'd rather
trust as much as I can to the Linux virtual machine. :D

I'm sure there's a good reason though... (e.g. running more than one
SBS server and saving hardware?)

Gordon

ESXi *officially* is not a Linux system.  This can be confusing since
ESX (note it lacks the lowercase i) has a hypervisor (the same as ESXi)
but also a RedHat based "management" system.  ESXi lacks this
"management" system.  The ESXi system seems to look very much like a
Linux system, same files in the same place, executables being listed as
Linux ELF binaries, etc, but word from VMWare is that it is *not* a
Linux system.  *ahem*

OK. I'm completely gob-smacked by this. I guess it's something that the corporate manglement types like.

Although I guess if VMWare are touting it as sort sort of virtual hosting platform and they can get away with it, then ...

ESXi Hypervisor can have SSH enabled (which I have done).  Watching the
equivalent of "dmesg" when plugging in the USB drive is quite
revealing.  It recognises that it's a USB storage device but offers no
way to mount the filesystem - even when you use the native tools to
create an VMFS on there, it still won't mount it.  Nor is there the
ability to directly pass a USB device to a guest system.

So it is a Linux distro that they've packaged up. Intersting concept. Shame it's crippled by default!
well it should be GPL'ed so just uncripple it?
Tom te tom te tom


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