This post is more than 5 years old
5 Posts
0
20475
PE 2650 - boot from compact flash?
Hi, we have a few poweredge 2650's sitting around that we wish to use as esxi servers. we have an openfiler san using iscsi for the storage of the vm's.
we want to remove all hard drives and boot from compact flash. we know you cannot boot from usb etc on the 2650's but you can boot from floppy or cd.
with this in mind, we have come accross a compact flash to floppy card and was wondering if this would be possible as the compact flash adapter hooks directly up to the floppy ide cable and is bootable. will it work with a pe2650?
regards
louis
Dev Mgr
4 Operator
4 Operator
•
9.3K Posts
1
March 26th, 2009 07:00
You'd probably be the first to try it, or be one of the first to try it.
The 2650 doesn't support x64 or VT, and ESXi isn't supported on the server (due to the old processors), so if you can get it to work at best you can run 32-bit VMs.
I wouldn't recommend it for production, but as your servers are out of warranty already most likely I'd guess this would be just for a test setup for you.
louis-m
5 Posts
0
March 26th, 2009 14:00
Hi, thanks for that. vm's (albeit 32bit) run absolutely fine on 2650's even though the processors don't support it. they run fine in production too as we had a few instances of where we've had to swap the odd server out for a short period.
the compact flash thing is mainly an experiment to see what sort of minimalistic server or pc that we can run esxi on and how fast we can recover (ie swap a spare preconfigured compact flash card etc)