Haitus….

Well – thanks to a contract glitch I’m spending a few weeks off work. 🙂 No biggie, and I’ll be back before you know it.  It’s been a great opportunity to get some stuff down around the house, build my new workstation, get backups under control, etc. 🙂

My new workstation is a riot, started out Building an updated workstation, ended up something completely…well….other.

The particulars:

• SuperMicro Serverboard
• Dual Xeon Quad-Core processors
• 16GB of Buffered/Registered/ECC memory
• Dual NVidia dual-head video cards.  (4 heads total)
• Emulex LP9002-DC Fibre Card
• Generic BDRAM drive.

It’s nuts.   First think you’ll note, no hard-drives.  I’m booting from the Clariion.  Set up a dedicated Raid-Group and built a 128G Raid-1/0 lun for the boot volume.

Lastly, the Operating System.  Well I couldn’t use Windows7 for the OS, as much as I wanted to, because PowerPath doesn’t support Windows7 (yet?) so I went with Windows 2008 R2, x64.  Nicely you can put it in desktop mode (by adding the “Desktop Experience” feature) and it does basically the same thing.  A copy of VMWare server and I run anything that requires XP in a VM.  (Like my work VPN c;oemt, which *HATES* 2008, or 64bit, or both. 🙂

The greatest part is booting from the SAN I have nightly snapshots taken of the OS volume, which makes life easier in case I blow something up.

It even runs World of Warcraft, which of course was also a requirement. 🙂