bensewell Posted October 27, 2010 Posted October 27, 2010 Hi, Going to be doing lots of virtualisation training at home over the next 12 months or so and also doing MCTS Enterprise Admin hopefully. I'm after buying a whack off machine to run multiple virtual machines on. Now i can easily get a second hand 4U server from fleabay but dont really want that big kind of thing in my spare room. They are far too long unless they can be boxed into a big tower. Does anyone know or have and is willing to sell / or have contacts of where i can get myself a dual xeon tower based system with lots of ram capacity. The cheap the better. Was thinking something along the lines of 2 * 3.2 Xeon CPU's with 8GB of ram. Should be able to run two or three win2k8 servers on this. Might just need to spend a bit though and got dual quad but know it will be expensive. Any ideas?
featured_spectre Posted October 27, 2010 Posted October 27, 2010 Speak with Joe at cp...does good prices on bespoke builds, dell HP etc.
rh91uk Posted October 28, 2010 Posted October 28, 2010 Try one of the HP proliant ML series ... have one of those here for some testing purposes. HP ProLiant ML110 G6 Tower Server - 2.8GHz - 1GB.. | Ebuyer.com We brought lots of extra ram for it too ... think we've got 8gb in ours.
jamesfed Posted October 28, 2010 Posted October 28, 2010 Before you start looking at 2 socket processors you might want to have a look at the AMD 8 and 12 core offerings (we have a HP DL165 G7) with one AMD 8 core that’s running 5 VMs at the moment. You might be able to save some money there with just a little consideration for the actual performance requirements of the VMs if you need to end up going new buy.
Haptic Posted October 28, 2010 Posted October 28, 2010 I have PM'd you.....give me a shout if you think we can be of use to you. We are very competetive on servers. Chris
EduTech Posted October 28, 2010 Posted October 28, 2010 (edited) I am currently looking around for some nice powerful boxes that are not too expensive!! so I'll let you know if I find anything around :-) CPU Intel Core i7 950 (4 x 3.06GHz) 8 MB 12GB (6x2GB) XMS3 1333MHz - Lifetime Warranty (DDR3) 1 TB (1000 GB) SATA-II HDD UDMA 300 7200 32MB Edited October 28, 2010 by EduTech
bensewell Posted October 28, 2010 Author Posted October 28, 2010 Thanks Everyone. What I didnt make clear is that this is for my own personal use so really want a tower jobby. All looking good so far though Got lots of things watching on *bay but think getting something a bit newer would be better. Would love two quad core xeons but dont have a spare few grand knocking about ;p
EduTech Posted October 28, 2010 Posted October 28, 2010 (edited) Thanks Everyone. What I didnt make clear is that this is for my own personal use so really want a tower jobby. All looking good so far though Got lots of things watching on *bay but think getting something a bit newer would be better. Would love two quad core xeons but dont have a spare few grand knocking about ;p The i7 Processor I mentioned I would of thought would be fine, there are also some AMD Equivalents I did a quick quote on the site below, and for the above Processor/RAM/HardDrive with just standard PSU/MB/Case/DVD Drive it was only like £700 Custom Built Computers & Custom Gaming PCs - Computer Planet An AMD Version: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (6 x 3.2 GHz) AM3 9MB - Black Edition Corsair 16GB PC3-10666 1333MHz (4x4GB) - Lifetime Warranty (DDR3) Gigabyte GA-MA74GMT-S2 (AMD 740G) AM3 650W PSU 1 TB (1000 GB) SATA-II Western Digital (WD10EARS) - 64 MB - Caviar Green Samsung (S222A) DVD +/-RW 22x Dual Layer - Black (IDE) System Total Ex Vat: £ 598.10 Vat (17.5%): £ 104.67 Grand Total Inc Vat: £ 702.77 James. Edited October 28, 2010 by EduTech
jamesfed Posted October 28, 2010 Posted October 28, 2010 The i7 Processor I mentioned I would of thought would be fine, there are also some AMD Equivalents I did a quick quote on the site below, and for the above Processor/RAM/HardDrive with just standard PSU/MB/Case/DVD Drive it was only like £700 Custom Built Computers & Custom Gaming PCs - Computer Planet An AMD Version: AMD Phenom II X6 1090T (6 x 3.2 GHz) AM3 9MB - Black Edition Corsair 16GB PC3-10666 1333MHz (4x4GB) - Lifetime Warranty (DDR3) Gigabyte GA-MA74GMT-S2 (AMD 740G) AM3 650W PSU 1 TB (1000 GB) SATA-II Western Digital (WD10EARS) - 64 MB - Caviar Green Samsung (S222A) DVD +/-RW 22x Dual Layer - Black (IDE) System Total Ex Vat: £ 598.10 Vat (17.5%): £ 104.67 Grand Total Inc Vat: £ 702.77 James. Nice Spec I'd suggest you have a look at dual hard drives (RAID0 if you have a good backup) considering you are hosting VMs you will need the extra spin speed.
bensewell Posted October 28, 2010 Author Posted October 28, 2010 Wow that's a right beast. Might have to push the budget though. I'll have a ponder.... Cheers,
Arthur Posted October 28, 2010 Posted October 28, 2010 The cheaper the better. Was thinking something along the lines of 2 * 3.2 Xeon CPU's with 8GB of ram. Should be able to run two or three win2k8 servers on this. Dual quad core Xeons are a bit overkill for only 2-3 VMs. For the price, it’s hard to beat AMDs six-core Phenom II X6 1090T (as James suggested above), especially when paired with an 890GX-based motherboard. Which hypervisor are you going to be using (ESXi, Hyper-V, Xen etc.)? If ESXi, you could boot it of a USB flash drive and use an SSD to store the VMs like Simon Gallagher has done with his vT.A.R.D.I.S. Also, in addition to the 2-3 Windows Server VMs, do you plan on using any others e.g OpenFiler, FreeNAS, NexentaStor, EMCs Celerra VSA for shared storage or Vyatta Core for routing?
pete Posted October 28, 2010 Posted October 28, 2010 You can do all you've mentioned on a low end HP tower (ml115 or whatever replaced it). If you're only playing / learning you really don't need a production-spec box, just something that's fast enough not to annoy you. My virtualisation setup cost less than my Technet sub: £99 for an ml115, ~£60 for extra ram, couple of 92mm Nexus fans + grommets to replace the noisy stock fans + 3 spare sata disks I had lying around. 1
bensewell Posted October 28, 2010 Author Posted October 28, 2010 Hey pete. I'm liking your thinking, but my stock machine at home is amdx2 with 4GB of ram and wouldnt cope, might just get something quad core and transfer a few bits over. Arthur, thanks for the extra advice its worth looking into. I'm planning and swotting in a bit of all VM technology but mainly VM Ware and HyperV.
Arthur Posted October 28, 2010 Posted October 28, 2010 (edited) You can do all you've mentioned on a low end HP tower (ML115 or whatever replaced it). The ML115 G5 has been superseded by the Proliant MicroServer. Although this works perfectly fine with vSphere, it is a little underpowered. If I had to buy a pre-built server, I would choose an ML110 G6 with a Xeon X3430 since it also supports VT-d (which may or may not be important depending on what you want to do). The Broadcom NC107i Gigabit NIC and Smart Array P212 controller are both fully supported by ESX 4.0/4.1 too. For HDDs, I would avoid WDs Caviar Green drives like the plague. These do not work well in RAID arrays and would be quite slow. Edited October 28, 2010 by Arthur
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