Monthly Archives: April 2013

My ESXi Whitebox build

Building your own ESXi server for the home can be a bit of a difficult journey. Many options are available, whether you purchase a “consumer” PC or go all out and purchase a server is a good starting point.

I decided because of power consumption, price and noise to go with a white box PC solution.

The Intel Q77 chipset is fantastic for VMware since it supports vt/d and contains the Intel AMT feature. This is the very similar to the HP i/lo, Dell DRAC or IBM IMM, the IP KVM is there and it’s great. Since vt/d is supported VMware Direct Path I/O works on this board.

1 x Intel Core i7-3770 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor LGA1155
1x Corsair 450 Watt PSU
2x 1TB Western Digital Green HDD
1 x Intel BOXDQ77MK Motherboard
4 x 8GB 1600MHz DDR3

Citrix Xen

In 2007, Citrix acquired XenSource gaining control over the development of the Xen Hypervisor part of the Xen project. Today Citrix announced that it will hand over the Xen Project to the Linux Foundation which will continue its development. After both Ian Pratt and Simon Crosby who came from XenSource left Citrix to start their company Bromium, Citrix has clearly been struggling on how to continue its involvement in the development of the Xen project, leading to this decision.

The following companies will contribute to and guide the Xen Project as founding members of the Collaborative Project at The Linux Foundation: Amazon Web Services, AMD, Bromium, Calxeda, CA Technologies, Cisco, Citrix, Google, Intel, Oracle, Samsung and Verizon.

It’s interesting to note that the Linux Foundation also supports the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) development, the hypervisor included in Linux. Perhaps we can see some joint development towards a new hypervisor in the future, this remains to be seen of course.

Xen.org will be moved to Xenproject.org the new home of the project.

My first blog

Thank you for swinging by my site! My name is Rhys Hammond and this is my blog for technical subjects.

I live in Brisbane, Australia. When I’m not working on the house or spending time with my partner, I’m enjoying the odd video game or two.

I’ve been in the Information Technology field for almost 10 years, starting out with desktop support. Along the way, I worked as a laptop technician and a computer salesman. Currently, I work as a system engineer focusing on virtualization, x86 servers, storage, backup and disaster recovery.