This weekend I’m moving to a larger apartment with more amenities, so I’ll be pretty busy for the rest of the week.  I’m working on creating the initial infrastructure for the AbiCloud lab, installing VMWare ESXi on all my test machines, and I’ve decided to dig out some of the Cisco gear I’ve accumulated and get that involved.  I’ve already done some initial documentation of the ESXi installation and hardware considerations and I’m looking for a couple Dell rack-able machines to introduce to the system as well.  Some of those considerations:

• Did I check each component against the ESXi compatability list
• Does each server meet minimum requirements for memory and storage
• Does each server possess a GigEth NIC to connect to the private storage network
• Did the BIOS settings for VT and ACPI get assigned the correct values
• Does each machine have some level of RAID enabled for individual redundancy
• Am I a huge fan of the way things will be partitioned
• Have I enabled SSH and created a self-signed SSL

I’m not certain Stefani is going to be as enthusiastic about this as I am, but she is incredibly patient with me and my past-times.