Server choices for small home lab

coillcam

Just finished the fast track vSphere 5.5 course this week. Looking to get a small lab setup for tinkering with before sitting the VCP exam in the coming weeks. I'll re-use it again for Hyper-V when I start studying for MCSA Server 2012.

I've been considering buying a laptop or HP Microserver. Any recommendations or good deals out there?

Kinet1c

All depends on your budget. You could look at Microserver with 16GB ram (google for specific ram modules that will allow 16GB to work) as well as some ssd. Your issue is the CPU and it's lack of grunt.

If you google "nanolab" you will see the Intel NUC being put to good use but again, there are some bottle necks. You'd need to get a decent NAS, some features of VMware will only work with specific NAS so read very carefullly on this if you go this route. I think RAM is limited to 8/16GB in the NUC, been a while since I checked.

If you'd a decent spec'd laptop/desktop (i7/32GB/SSD) then you could nest it within VMware workstation/fusion (google "autolab" for guidelines).

Or you could go for a tower sized server from HP but I'm guessing size/heat/noise/cost are the reasons you've not looked at this option in your OP.

coillcam

Kinet1c wrote: »

All depends on your budget. You could look at Microserver with 16GB ram (google for specific ram modules that will allow 16GB to work) as well as some ssd. Your issue is the CPU and it's lack of grunt.

If you google "nanolab" you will see the Intel NUC being put to good use but again, there are some bottle necks. You'd need to get a decent NAS, some features of VMware will only work with specific NAS so read very carefullly on this if you go this route. I think RAM is limited to 8/16GB in the NUC, been a while since I checked.

If you'd a decent spec'd laptop/desktop (i7/32GB/SSD) then you could nest it within VMware workstation/fusion (google "autolab" for guidelines).

Or you could go for a tower sized server from HP but I'm guessing size/heat/noise/cost are the reasons you've not looked at this option in your OP.

Its actually the autolabs solution I'm looking at I could nest it with workstation/fusion on my laptop but a dedicated device would be better with the virtual lab running inside ESXi. 8GB is the min supported for the latest autloabs and 16GB is recommended.

It doesn't need to be powerful and I don't mind bottlenecks as I only need basic scenarios just for practicing. Our licencing at work isn't enterprise plus so I'll never get to test the extra features otherwise.

There are a couple of decommissioned hosts at work from our last upgrade this summer but we've no rack space and its too much hassle to get them working at home. Also I was thinking that the microserver would be a great little solution as a HTPC/NAS/Torrent box after its served its purpose.

Kinet1c

coillcam wrote: »

Also I was thinking that the microserver would be a great little solution as a HTPC/NAS/Torrent box after its served its purpose.

I can confirm it does indeed work well, a low profile gpu will give you full HD. Been using it like this for a number of years.

In relation to autolabs on the microserver, I'd defo go for 16GB. I used it nested with 8GB and it was slow as hell on my i5/8GB/SSD laptop.

coillcam

This week my boss took me aside to ask when I was planning to sit the exam and I told him the plan about a home lab. So it turns out the lack of rack space was due to the old hosts being left in the rack. I was on annual leave during the upgrade and assumed they were fully decommissioned.

So I've booted them up and stuck on the the latest version of ESXi. I now have 2x Dell poweredge 2950's at my disposal. Each with 2x Quad-core Xeons and 32GB RAM. A little bit of overkill compared to what I was looking for . The boss just said: "Knock yourself out but don't interfere with the production servers/network"

I'm going to plough ahead and pick up a microserver for home use anyway. They're just too cheap to ignore and the HTPC/NAS/Torrent box idea seems like a nice side project when I get some free time.

Kinet1c

coillcam wrote: »

I'm going to plough ahead and pick up a microserver for home use anyway. They're just too cheap to ignore and the HTPC/NAS/Torrent box idea seems like a nice side project when I get some free time.

I've got XBMC on mine running sabnzbd/sickbeard/couchpotato/transmission. Works extremely well and with a simple samba share on it, even herself can store files to it.

coillcam

Kinet1c wrote: »

I've got XBMC on mine running sabnzbd/sickbeard/couchpotato/transmission. Works extremely well and with a simple samba share on it, even herself can store files to it.

Picked up a microserver last week, thanks to fellow boards.ie member Alun (a true gent!)

What OS are you using for this? I'm 50/50 now on doing something like above or going the freenas route.

With freenas, I'm thinking of an i5 PC to run ESXi and a few VMs off iscsi with the bulk of the space for storage. Possibly an Icydock cage for adding more drives in the microserver. Feck I'm down the rabbit hole of dumping a load of cash at this now .

dingdangdoo22

what microserver did you go for? looking to get one myself. but would like to have 32gb.

Kinet1c

coillcam wrote: »

Picked up a microserver last week, thanks to fellow boards.ie member Alun (a true gent!)

What OS are you using for this? I'm 50/50 now on doing something like above or going the freenas route.

With freenas, I'm thinking of an i5 PC to run ESXi and a few VMs off iscsi with the bulk of the space for storage. Possibly an Icydock cage for adding more drives in the microserver. Feck I'm down the rabbit hole of dumping a load of cash at this now .

I'm using XBMCbuntu, so it just loads in to XBMC straight away when it powers on. Just has ubuntu under the hood so I set up samba and a few other items easily enough over ssh.

coillcam

dingdangdoo22 wrote: »

what microserver did you go for? looking to get one myself. but would like to have 32gb.

A lightly-used Gen 7 with 8GB RAM. You'd need a Gen 8 to fit 32GB of RAM. The RAM upgrade alone is going to cost a bomb for 2x 16GB DIMMs (€300+). Also to get any benefit from that much RAM you'd also be looking at lumping in a Xeon upgrade. You might be better looking at rack mounted server or tower imo.

Kinet1c wrote: »

I'm using XBMCbuntu, so it just loads in to XBMC straight away when it powers on. Just has ubuntu under the hood so I set up samba and a few other items easily enough over ssh.

Class, its like a grown up version of raspbmc from my Pi - forgot about that.

Kinet1c

coillcam wrote: »

Class, its like a grown up version of raspbmc from my Pi - forgot about that.

Yup, in fact if you set it up with SQL you can use it share the media to your pi and thus have stuff like played/unplayed the same on both devices. It'll need your MS obviously powered on to work as it'll all be stored there.