So here I am with three sweet servers for $600. I now had another issue to solve...
How do I use them?
Funny
as it may sound, something I do everyday at work slipped my mind, before my wife asked me how much was my lab going to cost us
overall when I mentioned buying the servers. I then sat down to
think about what my design goal was and here's what I came up
with:
- With three servers I can dedicate one to running my home server infrastructure (ie. AD, DNS, etc.)
- I can run my VMware lab on the other two by virtualizing three ESXi servers on each of those hosts
- I wanted to use shared storage from the get-go just to get more practice in and to test some theories out (like running VDI completely off of NFS since vSphere 5.0 and above can reference the storage device by DNS name now... not exactly sure how View composer is going to react to that, but we'll see). Just needed to pick out a NAS that supports VAAI
- On the physical side, I need to completely enclose these servers in some kind of sound proof rack so I wouldn't drive myself and my wife crazy when we're up here in my office trying to relax.
- I would need a gigabit switch with jumbo frames and port channeling (LACP) for decent iSCSI performance
- I would need a good UPS with at least voltage regulation and hopefully of the pure sine wave type
I settled on using a Synology DS1512+ for the shared storage because of the VAAI support, dual nics, five bays and nice reviews (http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-reviews/31774-synology-ds1512-disk-station-reviewed). I'm also going to use a TP-Link TLSG2216 to run the network because of the low cost (roughly $150), LACP support and jumbo frames. From a high-level standpoint, this is what my lab will look like:
(on a side note... yes it does say 2.5GHz for the processor speeds on that picture. That's because I'm still on the fence about picking up some cheap low power Xeon L5420's to swap in there)
Next up... how I will keep my sanity while using the lab.
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