Data Center Consolidation

Posted by JohnP 08/01/2007 at 15:29

Building a new PC for my home "data center consolidation" effort. Here’s the equipment list (so far):

  • Motherboard: MSI 975X Platinum PowerUP v2 775
  • Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 (4mb cache)
  • Video: Gigabyte nVidia 7600GS 256MB Silent Pipe PCI-E 16x (GV-NX76G256D-RH)
  • 2GB CORSAIR VS2GBKIT667D2 DDR2 RAM
  • NEC DL-DVD Writer
  • Motherboard has 7.1 DTS audio, GigE NIC, 2xFirewire, 4xUSB 2.0, 5xSATA2, 3xPIDE, RAID 0, 1, 10 onboard.
  • Antec NeoHE 550W Power Supply (Fry’s had an unbelievable sale!)
    Still needed:
  • External Array – local copy of Cooldrives.com article. I saw a 4 drive bay SATA array at Fry’s for $120. Very interesting….

Intent was originally to use SuSE 10.1 as the VMWare Host OS and drop WinXP, Ubuntu, Fedora, NAS, router/firewall distro and MythTV has Client OS installs. Unfortunately, the drivers for the motherboard, RAID, nVidia and audio are all Win32, so if I want to use any of the high end capabilities, then WinXP needs to be the host OS. I occasionally play games – it isn’t mandatory, but I will not purchase another copy of WinXP for this new box. OTOH, I won’t run an illegal installation on my current Windows PC either. What should I do?