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I'm looking for a small, quiet, server to host a few VMs. My only requirememnts are that it can do 16GB RAM, have dual NICs, and that it's small as it'll be sitting on a shelf in a crowded half-height rack. Thought about building a whitebox but then I saw that the HP MicroServer can be had for about $500, is pretty small, and can be maxed out with a Xeon and 16GB ram if necessary. Anyone using one of these bad boys as an ESXi host? It would really only be running a few active directory related VMs, nothing groundbreaking. I know everyone loves to recommend whiteboxes but I'm not really sure I can do a significantly better job of assembling a small form factor server for under $500 (yes, over $500 if you factor in RAM, etc).
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Jan 12, 2014 17:56
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Something like this? That's 16GB, 55W Dual core w/ HT, shuttle with Dual NICS, and a 500GB Hybrid hard drive (8GB cache) Alternatively you could swap out the SHDD for a 128GB SSD if you wanted for 10 dollars more Oh I misread your post, I know a few people running the microservers they perform directly relative the the HW you load it up with; the only real "gain" is you can download an esxi image from HP and get it with the custom/advanced drivers loaded, and you may have a bit better time as esxi progresses. Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 20:32 on Jan 12, 2014 |
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Jan 12, 2014 20:21
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I am looking to build a home lab that will allow me to study for a number of exams(VCAP,VCP, and MCSA) over the next year or so. I would like to run about 2 domain controllers, exchange server, GNS3 and anything else I decide to play around with later on down the line. So far I have been leaning towards a white box. I tend to overdue it when purchasing hardware so I am looking for a second opinion. CASE/MOBO CPU RAM(2x) SSD(2x) 1TB HD I also managed to find a HP Proliant ML310e Gen8 which if I add the 2 Samsung 250GB EVO SSDs(link above) along with 32GB RAM will cost around 1,400. If anyone could weigh in with there opinions and help me narrow down my choices that would be great.
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Jan 13, 2014 04:19
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Oh I misread your post, I know a few people running the microservers they perform directly relative the the HW you load it up with; the only real "gain" is you can download an esxi image from HP and get it with the custom/advanced drivers loaded, and you may have a bit better time as esxi progresses. Yeah I'm not entirely sold on the HP over a whitebox like you posted. It'll probably be over $6-700 after I load it up with RAM anyway. I built a Nexenta SAN so I'll likely just be booting ESXi off of a USB drive so I don't really need any extra drives. The main draw to the HP was the fact that it's just built and I can run poo poo out of box. I guess I'm getting older and lazier but I'm leaning more towards prebuilt machines these days and don't really enjoy getting my hands into the guts of the hardware. Probably comes from working on vendor machines so much where if something goes wrong you just replace it. Bad habit but I can't say that just unboxing the HP and getting ESXi from the vendor isn't really appealing 
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Jan 13, 2014 04:30
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I am personally getting by fine with running consumer hardware and everything virtualized. Do yourself a favor and skip the K version of the processor. They don't support VT-D. Any reason why you are not going with your own case/mobo and getting a Haswell processor?
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Jan 13, 2014 04:31
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Moey posted:I am personally getting by fine with running consumer hardware and everything virtualized. Thanks for the input, I'll skip the k versions of the processors. I have been pricing so many different hardware configs that I completely forgot about the Haswell processors. 
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Jan 13, 2014 04:45
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likw1d posted:Thanks for the input, I'll skip the k versions of the processors. I have been pricing so many different hardware configs that I completely forgot about the Haswell processors. I am running a similar setup that runs all my lab stuff as well as my home servers (web, ftp, file/media). It is a micro-atx board, 3770, 32gb memory and a slew of disks/250gb SSD. I have it all shoved into a Fractal Define Mini. I also have a quad port Intel NIC that is sitting in there unused as well. Next upgrade is to buy an IBM M1015 and a bunch of new big slow disks for media storage.
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Jan 13, 2014 04:53
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Martytoof posted:Yeah I'm not entirely sold on the HP over a whitebox like you posted. It'll probably be over $6-700 after I load it up with RAM anyway. quote:I built a Nexenta SAN so I'll likely just be booting ESXi off of a USB drive so I don't really need any extra drives. Aside from ZFS what's your reason for choosing nexenta? I'm just curious. quote:The main draw to the HP was the fact that it's just built and I can run poo poo out of box. I guess I'm getting older and lazier but I'm leaning more towards prebuilt machines these days and don't really enjoy getting my hands into the guts of the hardware. Probably comes from working on vendor machines so much where if something goes wrong you just replace it. Bad habit but I can't say that just unboxing the HP and getting ESXi from the vendor isn't really appealing Fair enough, I won't knock you there. It's cool but eh I'm a cheapscape when it comes to personal labs and such. Moey posted:Do yourself a favor and skip the K version of the processor. They don't support VT-D. I wouldn't say this is a game breaker but is nice to have. likw1d posted:I am looking to build a home lab that will allow me to study for a number of exams(VCAP,VCP, and MCSA) over the next year or so. I would like to run about 2 domain controllers, exchange server, GNS3 and anything else I decide to play around with later on down the line. So far I have been leaning towards a white box. I tend to overdue it when purchasing hardware so I am looking for a second opinion. I'll throw something together if you give me a budget Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 05:22 on Jan 13, 2014 |
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Jan 13, 2014 05:08
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:I'll throw something together if you give me a budget I am looking to spend around 1,000 - 1,500(MAX). I don't have a problem spending 1,500 as long as I can spin up a bunch of VMs for cert learning/general tinkering around. I tweaked what I have in my newegg shopping cart based on Moey's recommendations and have the following: CASE MOBO PSU RAM CPU SSD (2x) HD I will gladly take any suggestions/recommendations you have. If you happen to see anything that I can skimp on without losing any performance(probably CASE/PSU/MOBO) that would be a great help. Thanks for your help.
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Jan 13, 2014 06:13
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drat son that's a sweet rack.
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Jan 13, 2014 06:44
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likw1d posted:-stuff- Final question and I'll put something together. Are you looking for a dedicated VM box or something you can switch back and forth on? Example: plug in a GPU to it and boot off windows, or plug/boot off usb to esxi? or soley boot to a vm environment
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Jan 13, 2014 07:29
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likw1d posted:I tweaked what I have in my newegg shopping cart based on Moey's recommendations and have the following: Looking good. That RAM seems drat expensive as I am running 32gb and didn't pay too much more for it (looked for sales). I wouldn't worry about the 1600 timing. If you are interested at all, I have a Lian-Li PC-Q08B case that is collecting dust since I upgraded from Mini-ITX to Micro-ATX (I wanted to upgrade from 16gb to 32gb of memory). Shoot me a PM (you would need to switch to a Mini-ITX board). Dilbert runs his desktop as his VM host, which is what he is getting at. I have no need for a desktop at home, so it just runs headless.
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Jan 13, 2014 07:42
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Moey posted:
Wait I do? I didn't know I did! I have a 48GB/8core/2nic/supermicro setup for myself. And 4 DL385 Gen8's 2x16c 2.6ghz/384GB ram/400GB SSD/12nic/DP FC 8Gbps, FAS 2240, PS4000 and par of SG 300's backed with 3750's + a bunch of G6's/G5's in my other lab Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 08:00 on Jan 13, 2014 |
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Jan 13, 2014 07:50
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Wait I do? Well farts, didn't mean to speak for you. Last I saw you post it was the AMD setup/primary desktop/VMware Workstation rig. I like the concept of having older enterprise stuff at home, but have no need for the extra space/heat/power/cooling that it would give me. I have stacks of similar gear at work I could screw with, but I have not exceeded the limits of a single box at home (no Cisco prep). I cannot imaging what your power bill is running that stuff.
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Jan 13, 2014 08:04
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Moey posted:Well farts, didn't mean to speak for you. all good! But yeah I have an extensive lab quote:Last I saw you post it was the AMD setup/primary desktop/VMware Workstation rig. I like the concept of having older enterprise stuff at home, but have no need for the extra space/heat/power/cooling that it would give me. I have stacks of similar gear at work I could screw with, but I have not exceeded the limits of a single box at home (no Cisco prep). other than the 6128/48GB ram/supermicro mobo + laptop and external monitor I have the rest is at the CC I teach at. Power bill is usually <50/mo for my hope, who knows what the other stuff is. Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 09:30 on Jan 13, 2014 |
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Jan 13, 2014 09:25
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Moey posted:Well farts, didn't mean to speak for you. Dilbert As gently caress lives and breathes VMware so his gear is probably co-located at a DC in Palo Alto next door to VMware HQ 
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Jan 13, 2014 09:27
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Aside from ZFS what's your reason for choosing nexenta? I'm just curious. Old timey Solaris admin so I wanted to check out the new school Solaris spinoff stuff, but it honestly doesn't really matter. I could replace it with FreeNAS or OpenFiler tomorrow for as much "work" as I put into it so far.
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Jan 13, 2014 13:02
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Final question and I'll put something together. Are you looking for a dedicated VM box or something you can switch back and forth on? I will pretty much use it as a VMware host. Mostly headless, and I was planning to boot off usb to esxi. If I had the option to plug in a GPU and run windows that would be nice but not needed as I have a decent PC that I do everything else on. likw1d fucked around with this message at 04:44 on Jan 14, 2014 |
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Jan 13, 2014 18:54
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What are you cats using to back up your VMs? I had the nightmare scenario - a single vmdk went corrupt in Openfiler, taking all of my nested VMs with it. I could set up the disks in openfiler in a raid setup, I could periodically backup the entire openfiler VM and all disks. There's options here, what's the best one?
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Jan 16, 2014 03:30
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:What are you cats using to back up your VMs? I had the nightmare scenario - a single vmdk went corrupt in Openfiler, taking all of my nested VMs with it. You can use veeam free, I've dabbled with that and VDP. Generally however I don't do backups of most of my (home) lab because I want poo poo to break so I can rebuilt it or diagnose cause/effect.
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Jan 16, 2014 03:33
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Dilbert As gently caress posted:Generally however I don't do backups of most of my (home) lab because I want poo poo to break so I can rebuilt it or diagnose cause/effect. It's also a good idea to practice configuring and restoring backups, since that's what you'll be doing in a production environment...right? I don't see any reason you couldn't diagnose a failure in your lab setup before rebuilding and/or restoring to get the best of both worlds.
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Jan 16, 2014 03:38
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Eh, point taken but this isn't anything to be diagnosed. I set up Openfiler, attached a large virtual hard disk to it, presented that as a LUN to a few ESXi hosts. One of the 10gb vmdk files that it created went corrupt, meaning all the information on the entire array is gone. There's no rebuilding it, it's just gone, because I didn't set it up like I would in a production environment with redundant disks etc. There's good break, then there's "guess I'm starting over". But yes, I need something in place before I get into this spot again. Veeam will probably be a good solution.
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Jan 16, 2014 03:47
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SamDabbers posted:It's also a good idea to practice configuring and restoring backups, since that's what you'll be doing in a production environment...right? I don't see any reason you couldn't diagnose a failure in your lab setup before rebuilding and/or restoring to get the best of both worlds. True, just setting up veeam/phdvirtual/srm and going through the recovery processes of each for the however many time just gets boring after a while. Besides I use that excuse because I am a cheap rear end in my home lab  I seem to run out of storage space before I max net/mem/cpu limitations.
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Jan 16, 2014 03:50
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Does anyone know if Microsoft has a SCOM evaluation program I can get in on to run an evaluation in my home lab? It's time to get current on some Microsoft technologies and for the first time in a long while I don't have access to an MSDN subscription. edit: Nevermind. Found the page here. Agrikk fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Jan 21, 2014 |
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Jan 21, 2014 02:13
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Need some advice on building a proper VMware lab. I currently have a consumer-grade whitebox I built to host my media server, backup server, firewall, Windows 2008 R2 test server, and a Windows 7 generic machine, but since it's my production server I'm a bit nervous about cranking down on it in case something breaks. Would it make sense to buy three used servers off Ebay and put together a lab with a basic AD/SQL/vCenter server on one, and ESXi on each of the other two? I'm sure I saw some servers with 8GB of RAM and quad-core Xeon processors in the $200 range. At present I'm using Workstation 10 to run a lab off my desktop PC, but it just doesn't have the same feel as having an actual physical lab and all the idiosyncrasies that go along with one.
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Jan 21, 2014 02:55
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Daylen Drazzi posted:Need some advice on building a proper VMware lab. I currently have a consumer-grade whitebox I built to host my media server, backup server, firewall, Windows 2008 R2 test server, and a Windows 7 generic machine, but since it's my production server I'm a bit nervous about cranking down on it in case something breaks. Would it make sense to buy three used servers off Ebay and put together a lab with a basic AD/SQL/vCenter server on one, and ESXi on each of the other two? I'm sure I saw some servers with 8GB of RAM and quad-core Xeon processors in the $200 range. Attend the gug this Wednesday I am doing a live presentation on that topic specifically! http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3601176 You can do all the ICM needed tasks and most of the VCAP with workstation, ]autolab makes a nice environment I wouldn't suggest ebay but I can put together a nice whitebox for a vmware lab in a ~500 dollar range. Most of those 200 dollar servers don't have hard drives which unless you have a nice NFS/iscsi setup your lab will be slower; some have aged proc's which may not work with 5.1 or 5.5. What I would do is disconnect your windows drive, install ESXi onto a USB drive and see how it performs. Once you're done with your testing on your whitebox and are able to see how it performs you can just simply plug/unplug the ESXi usb drive and boot back to your windows environment. Then use whatever you would to buy some servers on some SSD/SHDD or memory upgrades, and buy a POS 60 dollar laptop off ebay to manage the environment from a windows pc. Also vCenter won't install on an AD server unless you force it. What is your current setup look like hardware wise? Dilbert As FUCK fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Jan 21, 2014 |
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Jan 21, 2014 03:30
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In Workstation 10 I've got a total of five VMs setup and running. Three of the VMs are running Windows Server 2008 R2 - DHCP and DNS are running on the Domain Controller, SQL is installed on the second, and vCenter 5.5 is installed on the third. The remaining two VMs have ESXi 5.5 installed on them and are clustered together. Performance is a bit hairy since everything is running on a spindle drive, so I could probably improve performance by grabbing an SSD and using that. On the production side of things I have a i7-4770 and 32GB of RAM machine, with two 300GB spindle drives running RAID-1 which serves as my datastore. I have 4x2TB Seagate NAS drives set up in a software RAID-10 configuration that are set up as storage drives for my linux VM, and are not managed by the host. I suppose I could nest another ESXi VM, or maybe I could install Workstation on my Windows 7 VM and run the lab from inside that, but I'm unsure how stable that would be.
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Jan 21, 2014 13:33
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Im looking for a cheap/simple console server to manage my lab rack with. Does anyone have any suggestions?
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Jan 21, 2014 16:26
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Syano posted:Im looking for a cheap/simple console server to manage my lab rack with. Does anyone have any suggestions? Get a Raspberry Pi, a USB-to-quad-serial cable or two, and run Raspbian linux and Ser2net to make it a console server. edit-- or a 2511 on eBay or something
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Jan 21, 2014 17:03
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I got a Xyplex Maxserver 1620 off ebay for a hundred or so and it was pretty awesome, but I wouldn't really characterise the setup as "simple". Once I got everything working though it was as simple as "telnet maxserver ##" to get to whatever device I wanted. That was pretty awesome.
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Jan 21, 2014 22:25
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While we're on the subject of serial comms: Hello, someone please recommend me a USB->Serial adapter that works under Windows 8.1. All the generic PL2032 based dongles are based on EOL chips that Prolific stopped supporting in their new 8.1 drivers. I installed old Vista drivers which made the PL2032 work but it bluescreens my Win8.1 laptop on a regular basis so I'd rather just spend a few dollaroos and buy something that works out of the box.
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Jan 21, 2014 22:29
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Martytoof posted:While we're on the subject of serial comms: Tripp lite sells one that works out of the box Link: Keyspan Usb to Serial Syano fucked around with this message at 23:13 on Jan 21, 2014 |
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Jan 21, 2014 23:11
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I can confirm that the Keyspan USA-19HS adapter works under Windows 8. I also have a FTDI-based adapter which works great too.
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Jan 22, 2014 00:20
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Es bueno, merci!
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Jan 22, 2014 01:59
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Yeah, just avoid getting the lovely knockoff chinese copies and you're fine. Prolific got tired of the knockoff chips and just obsoleted them.
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Jan 24, 2014 03:21
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We had to remove all commercial internet access to all our networks and with that meant remote access to our 8 racks of lab equipment (MX960s / Cisco ASR's / etc). When bored I would use the lab to study here and there for both my CCIE/JNCIE exams this year and now that is gone......I needed an escape from boredom....so I'll just do something at home. I ended up getting a 12U cabinet off Amazon (it was wallmount so I had to add casters) and I stuffed it full of most of the gear I needed to keep from going insane from boredom.    I'm a little OCD when it comes to clean cabling.... Top to Bottom: Juniper SRX220H Juniper EX4200 Cisco 3750 Cisco 3560 2U Server virtualizing everything else for routing in GNS3. I still need to add a few more SRX's and maybe another Cisco switch or two. Next step, building out a nice provider sized MPLS network to mimic work.
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Jan 27, 2014 01:43
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Looking real good there, man.
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Jan 27, 2014 02:09
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GOOCHY posted:Looking real good there, man. Thanks. I get bored at home and now I have to drive into the office to hit the lab and that wasn't going to work. One other thing left is to get a REV4 PSU for the EX4200 to bring the noise down. Right now it is slightly audible even with office closet door closed.
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Jan 27, 2014 02:56
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edit: nm I am bad at reading
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Jan 27, 2014 04:18
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I'm currently studying for my CCNA. I'm now at the part of subnetting router protocols is right after this. and I understand how to do that. I understand the theory but I have no hands on experience with it. i know which cables to use i don't know how to make them. I can identify them. The only hands on experience I have is with Packet Tracer and that is virtualized. I want to know how to connect switches with a patch through the wall to a central switch. I want to know how to actually subnet routers. I want to know how to actually subnet and connect a real work environment. I don't have a lot of money right now. but I am saving up to buy a lab because what I have now won't cut it I think. I think my budget would come around to 500-800 euro's I have a PC with 8GB ram I7 processor 1 nic. and it is currently running 4 VM's (windows server 2012 domain controller, W2012 File Server, Windows 7 client and Linux Open Suse which I currently use to learn how to make a mailserver) I would love to have something like H.R Paperstack has. But it is way out of my price range. But I really love the setup. is there a budget version like that? that will be good enough CCNA en maybe CCNP in the future?
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Jan 31, 2014 10:34
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