Time for an update... The hardest part on getting the Dell 2950 server up and running was updating the various firmwares. The BIOS was at 2.0 and needs to be at 2.7, but I'm stuck at 2.5 for the moment; I've walked away from the issues (CD-R reader only, no USB support, no 1.44 floppy drive), but will re-visit it with MS-DOS in a few days. Burned a Free-DOS ISO and added the 2.7 update to the disk but the machine just laughed; dug out my old 6.22 DOS 1.44 disks and will have to fire up one of the antique Pentiums to burn another ISO. Windows 98 here I come... If anyone has a DOS ISO with the 2.7 BIOS update attached that is known to work, I'd like to be your friend...
All I can say about ESXi is wow... Freaking unbelievable; pfSense in one VM, Win7 in another, network support everywhere, VSphere is a dream to work with... and I've just scratched the surface. The pfSense documentation is superb in how it walks you through the VM setup and installation; from there building additional VM's & getting them up and connected is super easy.
I'm hooked; already looking at newer servers with lots of memory and hard drive, but will wait until the 2950 starts pushing back. 8 processors and 32GB of memory should do me for a couple months anyway.
Maybe.