Friday 5 June 2009

Installing EPiServer and VMWare ESXi

Wednesday this week our group IT manager Gordon brought us some new hardware to play with in the form of 3 HP DL308's (two G4's and one G3) which I think and hope we're going to consolidate our jumble sale of a server room onto for the most part with the use of VMWare's wonderful ESXi (version 3.5 because version 4 requires 64bit hardware and the VMWare compatibility list says the G3 and G4 are only compatible with 3.5).

I caught Matt just in time as he was about to install Windows 2003 on one of the G4's and got him to let me install ESXi on it. Which I did without hitch (except for when I couldn't get the networking to work, then I realised the Ethernet cable wasn't plugged in). Then it was a cinch to download the Infrastructure Client from the box and spin up a new VM and get Windows 2003 installed. Within an hour I'd got a new virtual development server up and running. Happy man.

Next up I downloaded and installed SQL Server 2005 Express, which didn't go quite to plan as the installer kept complaining that the SQL Native client installer package was missing. This was fixed by going into add/remove programs and uninstalling the (failed) Native Client install and starting the whole thing again.

Then came installing EPiServer CMS which was a completely painless task comprised of logging into EPiServer World and downloading the latest stable release (CMS 5 R2) and installing it, I then used the Deployment Centre utility to install the demo site for the team here to have a play with.

Job done!

Over the coming weeks I'm going to be posting a bunch more articles about my trials and tribulations with EPiServer which I'm looking forward to and hope will provide a nice chage from building brochure ware sites for purfume brands.

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