Haitus….
by Jesse on Feb.21, 2010, under General
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.
