As we move forward with Arena, we are trying to get some volunteers to come in and work on small projects for us. Being that they are volunteers we really don’t want to give them full access to the database, but we also don’t have another machine to setup. So we wiped out Development machine and re-installed it with VMware ESXi. So far so good. I have documented most of the server install process of the actual OS under the Arena section. Once the primary development virtual box is up and running I will begin installing a second development box that will have a test database for our volunteers to work with. This should give them the ability to build stuff without having to give them the whole database access.

As I said, so far so good. I am really liking what can be done with VMware ESXi. For awhile now we have been putting ISO disc images on our file server so we have digital backups incase a disc gets scratched or lost, as well as generally we can just mount the iso and install from it without needing a disc. Since VMware ESXi can mount NFS shares, I added the vmware machine’s IP address to the NFS list and was able to mount it as a datastore. Then I just selected the Windows Server iso as the CD image and booted up the virtual machine. I must say the install was FAST.