Hello list- I was able to take a few Netfinity 8500Rs from my old job as they had reached full depreciation and were headed to the dumpster. These are 8-way P3 Xeon 700MHz machines, with 16 GB RAM, a measly 4MB S3 video (won't take another video card), and two hot-swap U160 SCSI trays for which I had some 73.4 GB drives laying around. My hopes are to build up with FC7 to run Xen or VMWare to host a few VMs including one to run DynaMIPS to support my virtual Cisco lab for my CCIE studies. So, I've played with the FC7 Live CDs and am able to run DynaMIPS fine emulating (so far) 16 Cisco 3640 routers (woo hoo!), but it's only recognizing 4GB RAM of 16 installed. Question #1 ----------- So, I read in the FC7 relnotes that I may need to run a PAE-capable kernel and am wondering if that will be an install option or will I need to do an rpmfind or yum install or have to compile it from a tarball? I've been dabbling since RH5.1, 6.3, 7.3, FC1, FC2, and FC4, as well as Solaris, LEAF, Slax, Knoppix, and others, but my hesitance now is that I've never run any of these on any enterprise-class hardware, although I've built a number of Dell, IBM, and HP/Compaq boxes for Windoze and know that there are many hoops to jump through to get all of the firmwares, BIOSes, and drivers loaded in the right sequence. Couple that with these boxes being end-of-life from IBM and fairly hard to find info and drivers for them. Question #2 ----------- I am wanting to use an IBM ServerRAID 4M that I picked up on eBay to run a hardware RAID1, but only find that it's "supported" under RHEL3/4, some SCOs, Solaris, some Enterprise Calderas, Novell, and Windoze 2k/2k3. So, is it reasonable to assume that I may be able to trick FC7 into supporting the 4M under a RHEL driver? Question #3 ----------- Will running the PAE kernel from Q1 limit me in any way from running Xen? It's probably likely that I may run into a licensing issue in having either VM scheme supporting this much RAM or this many CPUs. Well, that's probably too much to ask for now, but thanks in advance for all responses! Regards, Rob
