OpenSource VMWare ESX?
Posted by ericjk on November 24, 2007
I’ve been thinking about trying to recreate an ESX like environment with the freeware version of VMWare server and Ubuntu. In theory if you…
1 - Install Ubuntu Server on a backend server that has a ton of storage which will be the “shared” storage server.
2 - Use NFS to share out big chunks of storage from the backend server.
3 - Install Ubuntu Server and VMWAre on the “frontend” servers (2 or More).
4 - Mount the shared NFS storage shares on all frontend servers
5 - When creating VM’s create them on the NFS shares.
6 - Power up a VM on a single frontend server but point all the frontend VM servers at all VM’s. This way if a frontend server dies you can recover to one of the other frontend servers.
It should work. Mind you having GigE network is sort of a must. Even better Dual NIC’s in the servers with separate GigE Switches or VLANs (one for storage the other for data).
