Nexenta Alpha 6 on ESX Server
Published on 24 Oct 2006 · Filed in Information · 177 words (estimated 1 minutes to read)Nexenta (also called GNU/OpenSolaris) is a blend of OpenSolaris, GNU, and Debian (Ubuntu, specifically). It’s pretty cool, actually—blending the OpenSolaris kernel with Ubuntu userland binaries to create something that’s not quite Solaris and not quite Linux, but has some of the values of both. For those of you interested in running it on VMware ESX Server, I’m happy to report that it does work just fine.
To install Nexenta as a VM in ESX, I used the following settings:
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512 MB of RAM
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4GB virtual disk (pre-allocated); obviously, you would want more space if wanted to do anything useful with Nexenta
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LSI Logic SCSI controller
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“Flexible” network adapter
The installation went very smoothly and very quickly (quicker than Solaris 10 and a couple of the other Linux distributions I’ve tried on ESX). The system came up very smoothly and was immediately accessible across the network. I didn’t try anything useful or meaningful with it; it is an alpha version, after all.
It’s worth keeping an eye on, at least. I’ll be interested to see how it develops.