NFS, SMB, and ESX 3.5 Upgrade

Still waiting for parts for the new build (mid-week??) so I moved forward on my Linux VM NFS testing.

My Linux utility VM now has an SMB mount point (client) from my Utility XP machine and some of the build ISO's have been copied over. Also, a 2nd vHard drive was added to the Linux VM to accommodate the ISO's.

One thing that is very clear: copying files from XP to Linux VM over the back door gig-e is much faster than copying from XP to the ESXi datastores. I have not looked closely with a sniffer to determine why this is, but it is something for the list.

An NFS mount point was added to Linux VM and a new Datastore was added to the Towers Cluster. A Win2k3 build was performed to test this scenario. Obviously, with the new NFS mount point sitting on a VM on the virtual Distributed switch, the Win2k3 build happens much faster. Wait until sysprep in configured!

Finally, the ISO for ESX 3.5 was procured from a colleague to allow testing of ESX 3.5 to ESXi 4 upgrade. This will happen in the next day or two.