Lab kit advice

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by JK2447, Sep 15, 2014.

  1. JK2447
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    JK2447 Petabyte Poster Administrator Premium Member

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    Hi all,
    I am planning on getting a few more servers to construct a reasonably cheap home lab. At the moment all I have is an aging Hp ML115 G5. The Hp Microservers are 100 squid so I figured two of those might do, what do you think? I think I can put 16gb in those, hopefully they are stable.

    Is there anything else I would be better off getting? I've seen some beasts on ebay but have to check what's compatible with esx 5.5

    Any help would be much appreciated
    Jim
     
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  2. GSteer

    GSteer Megabyte Poster

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    Came digging for info as I'm looking to expand my own this year, have been running on VMs sitting on Hyper-V on my Win8 desktop, there's plenty of RAM/SSDs but it limits me on the networking side and hardware failover testing etc. Plus I tend to turn this beast off as it sucks a chunk of juice. It wasn't too much of an issue in Canada where electricity was $20 a month but here in the UK at £45 a month it's a different game.

    What did you end up going for jk ?
     
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  3. JK2447
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    JK2447 Petabyte Poster Administrator Premium Member

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    Me being the genius that I am opted for no servers and to become an architect where I'll never touch anything physically again ha ha I am not loving being so hands off and considering going back as a server engineer. See how I go in the next few weeks.
    I did buy a slightly newer ML110 as I'm fond of HP's. One day I'll treat myself to something that makes the lights flicker but I've got too much out of work going on to justify that :(
     
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  4. SimonD
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    SimonD Terabyte Poster

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    So imagine my heartache mate, I am now supposed to be a hands off manager and it's killing me, especially as it looks like we are ripping out VMware and replacing it with OpenStack :(
     
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  5. Theprof

    Theprof Petabyte Poster

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    How come? I am assuming cost?
     
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  6. JK2447
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    JK2447 Petabyte Poster Administrator Premium Member

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    I don't mind doing designs, that can be fun, but being so hands off is really tough for me. I am seriously considering going back to senior engineer for a few years to get it out of my system. Possibly return to architecture in 5 years... damn us being such nerds! ha ha
     
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  7. SimonD
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    SimonD Terabyte Poster

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    Politics and Mind Set, house full of DevOps and them not really caring about enterprise level software and preferring the Open Source market space more.
     
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  8. Theprof

    Theprof Petabyte Poster

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    I see. Well I hope it works out... that's a pretty bold move to make!
     
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  9. dmarsh
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    dmarsh Petabyte Poster

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    Depends what they are trying to achieve, paypal ditched vmware for OpenStack.
     
  10. SimonD
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    SimonD Terabyte Poster

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    And Barclays ditched OpenStack for VMware ;)

    There are people out there who can find pro's and cons for both, as most people will attest to, OpenStack still isn't Enterprise ready (this is what Kilo is supposed to fix) so different use cases apply. Will it work? I don't know, my obvious personal choice is VMware but if it's not right for the business then it's not right for the business.
     
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  11. Theprof

    Theprof Petabyte Poster

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    I guess the important factor to consider, is if all the due diligence was done prior to making the decision.. But I agree with Simon, We're not really comparing Apples to Apples here, the two products don't offer the exact same feature set.
     
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  12. SimonD
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    SimonD Terabyte Poster

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    It would be better to compare vCD or vRA and OpenStack at a granular level.
     
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