Lab time! Part 1

I've been wanting to start writing about my adventures in home lab building but it's been difficult to come up with a way to talk about it that hasn't been hashed out one way or another before somewhere else. I've lost count of the number of web pages and forum threads that are devoted to building a VMware home lab so instead of rehashing all their posts here I think I'm just going to write about how I'm building mine, what I'm looking for design wise, and how much I'll be spending on each item. I hope these next series of posts will help someone else out as well.

My first objective of this home lab project was overall conceptual design. How was my lab going to look at from a high level overview and how was it going to function the way I was hoping it would. Since I don't have access to an actual lab at my work, I needed to build something that could not only act as a host for my own servers but that I could use to VPN into and test work stuff out on as well. I  knew from the beginning that one server wasn't going to do it for me... even with the ability to virtualize ESXi on top of itself. Basically it boiled down to I didn't have or want to spend $1500 to $2000 on a few machines that might cost me a bunch just to keep them running. I messed around with the possibility of building a AMD 8-core Bulldozer based "server" for a while because I could find a few deals that had the processor and board together for about $250 (namely at MicroCenter) but every time I came up with a price, I was still looking at around $500 - $700 for just 1 host with 32GB of RAM and some add-ons that I was specifically looking for. Since I'm a scrooge with my own cash I kept looking for a better deal. After months of searching for the right gear, I hopped onto ebay one day and saw this puppy:

I'll have to admit that after sitting there thinking about it I got a little excited. Dual quad core low- power 64 bit Xeons (with VT-d support) and 24GB of DDR2 FB-DIMMs with a 160GB hard drive, dual on-board gigabit NICs and a tiny 280W power supply... and it was half size. Every other time I was searching for cheap servers the usual batch of them came up with 4 to 8GB of DDR2, full size, 120W TDP processors that would cost me an arm and a leg to run and when I went to price it out, the extra RAM totaled four times the cost of the server itself. Not only that, but I know how servers were built during the days of socket 771... Loud. Very loud. These servers that I wanted needed to be housed in my office which also served as a night time get-away for my wife after we put the toddler to bed since we have a couch and TV in here. 

On a side note: Let's be honest here for a second... I'm not really sure why everyone wants hardware pass-through on their home server. Granted, you can do some really tricky storage related things with it but for all intents and purposes, if you're building a lab to mimic a real world scenario and to study for VMware certs, is it that important? Back to the fun stuff...

Now, I was hoping to go max RAM on VMware Hypervisor but for the price I was getting these servers for, I wasn't going to bitch about being only 8GB short per server. To be honest as well, picking up three of these for $600 and some change was a steal. I had an entire three host cluster for the price of one newer computer. I also told myself I would find a way to make these guys run quiet and I would have to do it without breaking the bank.

Stay tuned to see how I accomplished this feat!