Server update

I promised an update on the servers, so here we go. They are live! We had a few problems getting any version of CentOS other than 4.2 (x86) to see Intel's raid enclosure management software - but otherwise life is good. Between the two Port Townsend servers, we are running 11 virtual servers via VMWare Server (on Ubuntu server). Performance is very good for what we need. The only gotchas we encountered:

• CentOS 4.2 doesn't support iSCSI, and some of the older patches are very flakey. In particular, SQL Server on an iSCSI drive can cause a kernel panic on the storage server. This appears to be due to an out-of-memory condition. Later releases seem more stable, but we ended up not using anywhere near as much iSCSI as originally planned.
• Even on a physical host with two cores, dual-core VMs are a lot slower than single-core.
• Exchange 2007 is a resource pig, but very nice once configured.