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So this isn't homelab material (I already have a Norco with an E3 Xeon loaded with m1015's and drives -- it's terrific and quiet)... but... At work I need to set up a lab. Normally the answer to this is "just get some older decommissioned machines," but in this case, I really don't have any older machines*. So lets set a budget of 1500 dollars. I'm looking for some storage (probably going to be running some Solaris derivative for easy iSCSI/NFS), plus two ESXi hosts. This is a bit different than the home setup, since I don't pay the power bill or care about the noise, since it's going in a cute little half rack in the corner of our DC. So lets start out with two C1100's at $430 apiece (72gb ram, with rails, no drives). There are 32gb models for a few bucks less, but meh. Is there anything that's going to beat that, in a rack form factor? If I go with those two, I'll have 640 left over for some storage. I'd like to throw at least 1 SSD in there as well as a few 3.5 inch drives. What's a good choice here? As noted below, I do have some older machines, if there's a particularly sweet DAS or SAS expander setup. Oh, and I have a pile of terrible Dell 5224 switches sitting around, is there anything better in the ~200 dollar range? Tell me about your dream setups that your wife/mom won't let you have. * I have a pile of old 2950's (original, not iii) sitting around with 4gb of ram in them... I'm not really looking to buy loose ram for some even crappier Xeons.
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Sep 10, 2013 02:03
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evol262 posted:The question at this point is really "what are you going to do with your lab?" A whole bunch of things. We don't currently have any extra hardware to test large changes in our environment, so it would be nice. I've been using my home setup to make sure things work before I deploy them, but there are limits to what I can do at home. I have to maintain my impeccable "never fucks poo poo up" record. I'm in a very mixed environment where I'm technically a Linux sysadmin, but I end up touching storage, VMware, Windows and Windows clients (thankfully only on the deployment side) -- so it's really valuable to be able to play with stuff before making changes that would keep me at work past 5pm. As for storage... I actually have an MD3000i sitting around, but I wouldn't use it... it's a terrible device. I see people recommending the newer versions of it and I hope they've improved ( http://rtumaykin-it.blogspot.com/2012/04/fixing-unresponsive-management-ports-on.html as an example ). I'm probably going to go the route of SSD + a few 3.5" drives and buy better stuff later if I need it (I have a pile of 10k SAS drives sitting around too). The question is really about enclosures, since I want to be flexible in that regard. Thanks for the suggestion, Tekhne. Can you detail what "a little modding" actually is? I'm still leaning toward the C1100's with their 72gb of ram and a separate box for storage. Oh and please be friends.
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Sep 13, 2013 18:35
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Agrikk posted:This is my favorite. I realize this is tongue in cheek but... nagios shouldn't do this unless you've changed a bunch of check intervals. Once a host is marked down and a notification goes out, no more service notifications should be sent (until the host recovers). Also, if a service is detected as down, nagios will immediately re-run a host check. Usually.
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Sep 19, 2013 18:36
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IT Guy posted:Not sure if this has been covered in this thread before but I was looking into buying some new hardware and setting up a home lab so I can finally study/practice for some certs. I was going to build a server with like 64GB of RAM but I noticed that vmware esxi only supports 32GB with the free license. What are my options here? I could likely run all my labs on one machine, that's no question, but I have other servers that I wanted to consolidate into one VM host. How much would it cost me to move up a license for 1 host? Can you wait for 5.5? Supposedly they're removing the memory limit. You can run ESXi without a license for 60 days (no limits). I'm not sure if you work for an educational institution, but your school can plop down 250 bucks and get access (albeit only for faculty and staff) to ESXi and vCenter Standard licenses... good for 1 year. http://labs.vmware.com/academic/licensing-overview (find your school here http://onthehub.com/download/software-discounts/vmware ). If not for you, it might be useful for someone else, so I'll mention it.
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Sep 20, 2013 01:45
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You can grab a 2824 on ebay for 150 -- just from a cursory glance. I have it on good authority that you can replace the fans with quieter ones if you're looking to place it in your bedroom or something.
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Dec 10, 2013 18:32
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