ESX 3i on a 2950iii

I installed ESX 3i on one of our Dell PowerEdge 2950 III's in the lab to see what Virtual Center would show me from a management point of view. I pulled our latest image from our internal source, dd'd it to a USB flash drive. Then just slipped it into the internal USB port of the machine and changed the boot order and voila, ESX 3i was up and running.

Configured the IP address and that was it. I followed some simple instructions documented by our Dell Virtualization Engineering team (document link coming soon - once it's published) and the server showed up in my IT Assistant console under "VMware ESX Servers".

One useful thing that IT Assistant allows you to do is add a favorite application. You can define an .exe or a URL and then assign that to the IT Assistant groups so it shows up when you right-click. You can also pass parameters as arguments to give it more functionality. I added the Virtual Center Client, so I can right-click on any of the VMware ESX hosts and launch the VC client. Here's what it looks like in the IT Assistant console:



One thing I can't find is how to pass the userid and password as parameters. Searched a little on VMTN but couldn't find anything. If anybody knows, or has ideas, please let me know.

The Favorite Application feature is nice because you can launch any tool in your toolbox from a single pane of glass. I'm a fan of using the right tool for the right job, and this feature lets you launch the right tool. In the VC Client, there is some new information you can see from the Configuration tab. ESX 3i has the CIM layer built in so you can see some health status information from the server. Here's what we see with ESX 3i on the PowerEdge 2950 III:



So you can see Fan, Temp, and Power Supply information. I'm getting my arms around when the status changes from Green to Yellow to Red, and where the alerts get generated. I'll follow up with another blog entry on my findings.

We've also got another yet-to-be-named machine in the lab with ESX 3i, and it apparently has more instrumentation because here's the screen shot of what you see on its Health Status screen:



Scott