Hardware

I use a Macbook Pro with VMware Fusion, which lets me run a bunch of virtual Windows machines for testing. I upgraded my internal drive to a quick 320gb one a few weeks ago, intending to run all my VMs off that internal drive, making it easier to do testing on airplanes or in coffee…

Great news – Pedro Costa has got a working solution!  Apple Mac Mini 2010, 2011, and 2012 models all boot a patched version of VMware ESX 5.0: VMware ESXi 5 Running on an Apple Mac Mini I’d always wanted a small VMware vSphere 5 (ESXi) lab farm up and running, and I wanted to use…

We originally rolled out our HP C-Class blade infrastructure with Cisco network & Brocade SAN switches, and I’ve blogged about some of the challenges of lots of blade switches. Today, I’m going to talk about how the HP Virtual Connect equipment solved a lot of those problems for us and gave us a more flexible,…

In my last article about the C-Class chassis, I talked a little about the interconnect switches, and today I’m going to dive deeper. As with most full-factor servers these days, each single-height HP blade like the BL460c includes an onboard dual-port network card. The difference between standalone and blade servers starts here: thoe two ports…

Our shop took a sip of the the HP C-class blade Kool-Aid in early 2007 and liked the taste of it. I’ve got SQL Server running on a few pieces of HP hardware, and over the next few blog posts, I’ll look at the strengths and weaknesses of the BL460c and BL680c from a DBA’s…