David - it looks like my mobile device did a horrendous job of displaying your email so I apologise for coming off a bit half-cocked in the last email (and despite it being so much more OT conversation on the list, I still wanted to do it publicly).
2009/5/20 David Talkington <dt...@flyingjoke.org>: > Kevin Wilcox wrote: >> that practically necessitates IBM, Sun, HP or Dell hardware. > > No it doesn't. That was based on my last review of the .pdf we received from our VMWare rep that was, admittedly, some time ago. I just checked the ESXi HCL and I'm glad to see that support has grown *substantially*, particularly with them offering ESXi. So, my apologies for outdated information. >> Skip the virtualisation cruft and install natively. > > That isn't a helpful or enlightened answer (not that one should expect help > with this topic here). Agreed. A better reply (though perhaps less relevant) would be, O.P. - I do not have experience with OBSD on VMWare ESXi on a Soekris. I do have quite a bit of experience with OpenBSD on VMWare ESX on officially supported hardware and the results vary depending on load and how much tweaking you may or may not have to do with your configuration. For certain storage backends we have to do some minor voodoo to the disk configuration before the VM is made aware of the disk - this has caused several of our OpenBSD VMs to panic, an issue that in no way, shape, form or fashion am I blaming on OpenBSD - that problem lies with VMWare. On the other hand, I have virtualised OpenBSD firewalls on plain configurations sitting in front of virtualised servers (yes, it works for our needs) that never hiccup. The latest I am using is 4.4 as I've been unable to take any of those machines down for upgrade since receiving the 4.5 cds. Because of the quirks that are introduced with running on top of VMWare, if you have the hardware and this is a single use machine, I can't stress highly enough that, if at all possible, you should skip the virtualisation cruft and install natively. Performance *will* be better, as will reliability and the chance of finding some form of community assistance. > O.P., you should start here for detailed ESXi hardware support info: > > http://www.vm-help.com/ And the official VMWare HCL here should you ever decide to move to supported hardware: http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?action=base&deviceCa tegory=server kmw -- To take from one, because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association, bthe guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry, & the fruits acquired by it.'
