I am lucky enough to have a mate that from time to time gives me some of his old computer hardware. Recently he gave me a dual P4 2.4 Ghz XEON system along with (from memory) 5GB of RAM.
He installed ESX on it for me along with XP to only run the VI client – I feel a bit dirty running XP.
I am as happy as a pig in shit. Will slowly move my physical machines across to the new lump of hardware as VM’s using VMware converter.
Have already run into a problem getting an old Ubuntu 7.10 server install into ESX. It would appear that Ubuntu binds the NIC to a MAC and hence to an interface (eth0). ESX gives the VM NIC an new MAC address so its not getting on the network at the moment.
Looks like udev needs to be fooled into reassigning eth0 to the virtual NIC’s MAC address. Stay tuned (I’m sure you are all bursting to know what happens).