what is your power pc?

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What do you use to do all your lab work on? I currently use a macbook pro (late 2012) as my main system to run my VMs on, its a 2.5Ghz Intel Core i5 with a 250GB SSD and 16GB of RAM. Does the job no real intention of upgrading anytime soon, apple hardware is quite reliable I can honestly see myself getting 3 more years out of it at a bare minimum.

 

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This is still my lab - http://everything-virtual.com/home-lab-environment-2/

It now runs vSphere 6.5 rather than 6.0 but it still works a treat, all told it's 112GB of ram, the Microserver can only take 16GB of ram.

 

nice setup there mate, I often regret purchasing my mac, in total after upgrades I spent about 1k on it, I could have got a power horse of a windows machine for that money with double the amount of RAM I have now.. I can get away with running 3 VMS on the hardware I have now but its a push.

 

HP Proliant Microserver N40L picked up from Ebay, added 16GB Ram and some spare drives i had lying about, also came with an extra dual nic Gigabit card
Installed Esxi 6.5 Free Edition
Runs so far a couple of servers, OpenVPN and one windows box so far without issue

now just need to lab properly on it

 

I have 2x Dell R620s with 96GB each, 40GB nics
I have a custom build 2016 server with 50TB of Storage Spaces including a few SSDs for cache also on the 40GB network
I have a Tranquil PC v6XD cluster with i5NUC Head and two Xeon-D nodes with NVME and SSDs that fits in a flight case (use this for demos or labs on the go) unfortunately its the 1GB version not the 10GB version
I have an Intel Skull Canyon with 32GB and 2TB NVME that I use as a portable lab that can fit in my bag
and I carry a 2017 MacBook Pro with Touch Bar for my day to day work, don't lab much on it but it does have a Windows 10 bootcamp/parallels image that I use as well as macOS

Oh and I have a power bill... that tops $300 a month in the summer :/

 

oh yeah battery is a joke on that, but I have a the cool little tiny macbook and a Surface Laptop for ultraportables
and my little macbook can charge from my battery bank if it needs to, so i generally don't hit too many headaches, if the big boy is coming out it's near power

 

I have a Macbook Pro 15" 2015 edition (i7, 16GB, and 256GB SSD) that I use as my main computer with Parallels and a few VMs, although I don't run Windows on the MacBook, I typically run either Ubuntu or Mint Linux as VMs with MacOS being the main OS I use.

I also have a Gaming PC for one purpose mainly, but I also do have Hyper-V deployed on it since it has 32GB of Memory and I added a dedicated SSD for the VMs as well.

I also have two ESXi hosts (white boxes) with 64GB of memory total. vSphere 6.5 Update 1 deployed on it and I mainly use these servers for testing various apps. I don't do the same type of labs like I used where I kept an AD infrastructures at all times and SQL servers, etc.

I honestly want to get rid of the lab and have something mobile rather than something fixed in one location.

 

Guys can you tell me what's the advantage of working on a Mac? If you work mainly with Vsphere and things managed via web then you don't need Windows I guess. They are nice devices and all but I can't see the superiority in typical IT jobs, especially when working with Wintel stuff. Of course you can have a VM for this but you could as well have a linux laptop and a Windows VM...

 

I run an Azure practice, I often get this question
'you're a Microsoft guy, why do you use a mac'

reason 1. Superior hardware, i mean I lugged this thing on over 100'000 miles of travel around the world last year, it looks brand new, it has never blinked, it's never not powered on, and i can take it to an Apple Store anywhere on earth if anything crops up
reason 2. Cross Platform exposure. 40% of Azure workloads are not on Windows, I need a platform that I can test my tooling and code against various scenarios, the Mac provides me a platform that I can run macOS, Linux and Windows on, nothing else does
reason 3. Not a huge reason, but I enjoy some of the macOS apps, and again, on a Mac I can run Windows and macOS apps, so I can get the best of both worlds

I could get more POWERFUL hardware in a Windows platform, but this suits my need and has a good balance between form, function, and global availability of repair and accessories