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ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2

Dear VMware Customers,
We have released the express patches for the product expiration issue. Please go to http://www.vmware.com/go/esxexpresspatches for download and KB articles. Since our last customer email we have completed our verification tests that the express patches we’ve released are fully compatible with the VMware Update Manager. Please see [...]

ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2

Dear VMware Customers,
We have released the express patches for the product expiration issue. Please go to http://www.vmware.com/go/esxexpresspatches for more information.
Problem:
An issue has been discovered by many VMware customers and partners with ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 where Virtual Machines fail to power on or VMotion successfully. This problem began to occur on [...]

Got this from VMWARE today:

ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2

Dear VMware Customers,
Please find the latest update about the product expiration issue. From this point on, we’ll provide an update every two hours. Thanks.
Problem:
An issue has been discovered by many VMware customers and partners with ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 where Virtual Machines fail to power on or [...]

In early July 2008, I purchased a Dell T105 small business server to host some simple single-page webs.  It was my intention to use it as a web front end server for 12-18 months, then demote it to a simple fileshare.
Here is my review of the Dell T105 Server:
Configuration:

Dual-core AMD Opteron @ 1.8MHz
4 GIG 800MHz [...]

On July 29th, 2008, VMware introduced a free, bare-metal, (No host operating system required) virtualization server product.  It’s remarkebly robust and is super easy to install.
Get it here:  https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/login.php?eval=esxi&t=1
From VMware:

Features & Benefits
Virtualize processor, memory, storage and networking resources into multiple virtual machines with VMware ESXi, an enterprise-class hypervisor with a thin 32 MB footprint for [...]

Think of a normal N-tier application running on a single Windows 2003 Small Business Server.  You likely have multiple servers/services providing support for the web application via ISA, Exchange, SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory, etc., all running on the same physical box.
Now think of the common bottlenecks in this situation: w3wp.exe (IIS App Pool worker [...]

A few comments to start the post:

Virtualization is here to stay, end of discussion
Web server virtualization is just as efficient as physical hosting
Microsoft’s Virtual PC Virtualization is WORTHLESS. End of discussion (The Server 2008 edition rocks, more on that in another post!)
VMware is the industry leader, but there are a lot of other platforms on [...]

The following is a list of tools that most webmasters and web hosts alike utilize on a consistent basis to keep things flowing. When data flows, profits flow too.
Keep in mind that a lot of the descriptions are from the vendor’s page.
The vendor is responsible for the accuracy of the description. I [...]

There are typically 2 operating systems that web sites are hosted on: Windows or Linux.
Windows IIS (Internet Information Services) is the typical platform for Active Server Pages, or ASP pages. You’ll see a wide variety of file extensions hosted on IIS servers: .ASP, .ASPX, .HTM, .HTML, .PHP, etc.
Linux with Apache is the typical platform [...]

What is Web Hosting? Web hosting: storing files on a webserver for the purpose of displaying those files to authorized users. Simply put, you rent space on someone’s server, copy your web pages to the server, and tell the server to display those pages whenever anyone asks for www.YourDomain.com
Hosting a website is almost [...]