Alfred's Ramblings

This looks simple from the start. Install a Symantec Backup Exec 11d media server, a Remote Agent for Linux and Unix Servers (RALUS) inside the ESX server. Run a backup job and its done!

And then some.

Installed my first ESX server on a HP DL380 G5, quite an interesting experience. Overall the process is very smooth. The server is a standard edition, so I just accepted all the suggested defaults. My datastore is going to be on an iSCSI enabled NAS server, so the installer defaults will not affect the datastore. Note that the Qlogic iSCSI card should be PCI-X as the ESX 3.02 installer does not recognize the PCI-e cards. The one I used was QLA 40222. Strangely not listed on the website.

The network for the iSCSI traffic should be on its own private LAN for reliability and throughput. Ideally, seperate NICs and switches as the traffic is really high.

The last of the trilogy for the Bourne series. It shows Jason Bourne going back to his roots. As usual not much special effects just a simple script of a man trying to find out where it all began.

A very gripping movie.

HP offers this nifty little software to help you to migrate your installation from old or other platform to Proliant servers. With a management server, it will reboot the source server and copy the partitions directly to the destination server. This is done using with the aid iSCSI Software Initiator from Microsoft.

You can download the trial version from HP.com. Create a bootable CD from the installation file. Run the CD on the management and the source server. Follow the simple instructions on screen. Move the CD over to the destination server and reboot. On the management server initiate the cloning. After 35 minutes for 17 GB of data over a 1Gb switch its done!

The only catch is that your destination Proliant server should be G4 or newer and another thing.