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Lab server (vmware/hyper v etc)
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11-11-2015 12:14pm#1
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I got myself two HP ML150 G5's because 1. they were cheap for what you get, 2. they use standard parts, 3. it's a tower case, 4. because of 2 & 3 you can replace all the jet engine noisy fans and the standard heatsinks with off-the-shelf parts like (much!) quieter PWM fans and closed loop water coolers and you'll hardly hear a peep out of them. the PSU fan is still quite loud, but nothing by comparison to the standard internal fans, and my next job is to see if I can replace the PSU with a regular quiet PC one so they don't make hardly any noise at all.
other specs of interest are:
a pair of socket 1156 CPU sockets (although some only come with one CPU installed, so watch out for the dualies if you're fishing on ebay etc.).
12x DDR3 DIMM slots, which will take up to a confirmed 48gb total ECC Registered RAM, and possibly 96gb if you use 8gb DIMMS, but I haven't confirmed that yet.
3 external 5.25" bays and another 4 internal 5.25" that can be used for up to 8x 3.5" disks with the (already supplied) disk trays.
6 sata ports, at least 8x PWM fan headers, although the BIOS demands you have at least 4 connected or it won't boot, which was really annoying me when I built the first one, I eventually found out that you can use a jumper to overcome this.
The dual socket 1156 was one of the main reasons I went for them as this will take anything from al cheapo celerons and clarkedale i5/i7's (if you want to start with only one CPU) or a pair of the lower end X3430 2.4Ghz Xeon's (for as low as 25 euro each 2nd hand) if you only have the lower end of low budget, all the way up to a pair of the 3Ghz quad core H/T lynnfield Xeon X3480's, which still have a respectable CPU Mark score pushing 6000, which would put a pair of them nipping at the heels of the best current gen single socket Xeon's, which for less than 200 euro a pop 2nd hand, is a lot of bang for your buck.
All in all, you can get a decent test rig with a bunch of ram that is good enough to even manage nested ESXi/Hyper-V if you really want to have a good play with enterprise level stuff like SRM etc., and keep it all very quiet, which is great if you don't have anywhere to put them where noise isn't an issue, like me. 0 -
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ram ram and more ram!
seriously, in a lab environment your cpu's will likely just be ticking over on idle most of the time, but you still need plenty of ram to get anything done.
you can get away with a certain amount of memory overcommit/ballooning in vmware (not sure on hyper-v, but assume so too), but you still need a decent amount of ram to begin with, particularly if you plan on running a nested vmware cluster on a single host with multiple ESXi hosts and a VC as the VC appliance tends to crap itself if it has less than 8gb of ram (although you can get away with less if you install the windows VC), so between the 2gb minimum for each hypervisor even with no vm's (possibly even 4gb on ESXi v6 I can't remember), you've already eaten 12gb of ram before you have any test VM's loaded into the environment, so all of a sudden that 16gb of ram doesn't seem all that much when you're only left with 4gb free.
ram is cheap enough these days anyway, so worth loading it up with as much as it will take.0 -
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