#vmware #hyper-v #Synology #wordpress #
Wow, long story but I’ll make is short 
So I used to run my blog in Hyper-v using an old Mac Pro. I made the decision to upgrade it to VMware 4, and purchased a new Shuttle PC:
- Shuttle SX58J3 XPC Barebone for SKT1366 Intel CPUs – 500W PSU
- Intel Core i7 960 3.2 GHz Socket 1366 8MB L3 Cache Retail Boxed Processor
- Intel PRO/1000 PT Dual Port PCIe Server Adapter
- Asus HD 5450 SILENT 512MB DDR2 DVI HDMI VGA Out PCI-E Low Profile Graphics Card
- 2x Seagate ST2000DL003 Barracuda Green 3.5-inch 2TB SATA 6 Gb/s Drive
- Synology DS211+ (for ISCSI storage of my VMs)
Scott send me a website (http://www.vm-help.com//esx40i/esx40_whitebox_HCL.php) with VMware whiteboxes and that was shweet. BUT around the same time, VMware 5 came out. So I thought, stuff it, lets go VMware 5. Ah, not so fast .. I just could not get it to install! The installer would start and just hang, even if I left it for days on end, which the faint hope it would finish.
Bollox! so I tried VMware 4 and that worked fine. It appears that the HCL for VMware 5 is very different to VMware 4 so I was screwed!
That was it, stuff VMware, lets go back to hyper-v. Done some reading and thought how about Windows 2008 r2 core?
Nice, but i was expecting a Unix type interface, but you still get GINA and once you log in all you get is a command prompt windows and a funky script called sconfig to do everything.
After a bit of googling, I found Core Configurator 2.0 (http://coreconfig.codeplex.com/) over on codeplex and this is a god send, but you need to get Windows PowerShell installed on core, which is a bit of fun, but i managed it.
Next was Hyper-v. This worked fine, but the networking was as slow as a one legged dog. Then it dawned on me that the built in NIC on the shuttle was pants. Once I switched everything to the Intel Pro NIC, it was fine.
I built up an SCVMM box, and started to move my vm’s from the mac pro to the shuttle. It was slow but worked a treat.
Last to move was my blog. It turned out that one of the physical disks had a problem, which turned out to be on one of the virtual disks used by my Blog, and to make it worse it was the C drive. I was screwed!
After a lot of heart ache, I managed to get the blog backup and running, but community server that was running my blog just didn’t want to play ball. I upgraded the versions but still not joy, I just couldn’t get a “single” blog working properly.
I contacted the community server support guys, and the basically said, you need to buy a licence before we will help you.
Screw you thought, so I went on the hunt for another package which is WordPress.
I built a new windows 2008 r2 server and followed these excellent steps (http://webmasterformat.com/blog/install-wordpress-on-windows) and there you have it!
Back in the blogosphere. Still working on converting my old posts from community server, and they will come, but at least I have my voice back now.
Hope you enjoy the posts
flaphead.com 