Haggis Veteran Posted August 18, 2015 Veteran Share Posted August 18, 2015 Hi Guys I am after a new server I currently have an HP Microserver N54L but want something a bit beefier to be able to run more VM's etc to play about with I need ideas Looking probably up to around £500 Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nomadic78 Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 Self build or prebuilt? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nomadic78 Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 Ebuyer have deals on Lenovo's right now. Otherwise look at the X99 platform, MOBO, Xeon CPU and some DDR4 Ram paired with drives from your current server. Should get you to about £500. At least you can scale to 128GB in the future. Scan also a good site for X99 CPUs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason S. Global Moderator Posted August 18, 2015 Global Moderator Share Posted August 18, 2015 Ebuyer have deals on Lenovo's right now. Otherwise look at the X99 platform, MOBO, Xeon CPU and some DDR4 Ram paired with drives from your current server. Should get you to about £500. At least you can scale to 128GB in the future. Scan also a good site for X99 CPUs i think just the RAM would be over $500. DDR4 isnt exactly cheap... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
nomadic78 Posted August 18, 2015 Share Posted August 18, 2015 16GB of DDR4 can be had now for £80. X99 Mobo £130-£150. Xeon X99 CPU start at around £150. So £380, leaving £120 for case and PSU. Price of RAM from Overclockers, 16GB Teamgroup for £79.99. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+LogicalApex MVC Posted August 18, 2015 MVC Share Posted August 18, 2015 What sort of resource limitation(s) are prompting the upgrade?As we'll look to focus around that area for the replacement.I find that RAM is the most important commodity when dealing with VMs. So something that supports 64GB of RAM or more is a good baseline. Even if you initially load it with less. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Skiver Veteran Posted August 18, 2015 Veteran Share Posted August 18, 2015 What do want to run and what kind of spec to you think these things will need? It will probably help so people don't suggest something that still won't match. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason S. Global Moderator Posted August 18, 2015 Global Moderator Share Posted August 18, 2015 What sort of resource limitation(s) are prompting the upgrade?As we'll look to focus around that area for the replacement.I find that RAM is the most important commodity when dealing with VMs. So something that supports 64GB of RAM or more is a good baseline. Even if you initially load it with less. i agree w/ the RAM issue. i find that RAM constraints are the biggest hurdle for VMs. 16GB doesnt exactly seem like enough. that being said, however, we dont know what type of VMs Haggis wants to run. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
remixedcat Posted August 19, 2015 Share Posted August 19, 2015 Ebuyer have deals on Lenovo's right now. Otherwise look at the X99 platform, MOBO, Xeon CPU and some DDR4 Ram paired with drives from your current server. Should get you to about £500. At least you can scale to 128GB in the future. Scan also a good site for X99 CPUs Oh no you do not want LENOVO. They have BIOS level malware and stuff right now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+LogicalApex MVC Posted August 19, 2015 MVC Share Posted August 19, 2015 i agree w/ the RAM issue. i find that RAM constraints are the biggest hurdle for VMs. 16GB doesnt exactly seem like enough. that being said, however, we dont know what type of VMs Haggis wants to run. Agreed. He can likely get away with far less seeing as he is coming from a MicroServer, but I would prefer to have the expansion room on the board at a minimum. So you can expand RAM in the future without the expense of replacing everything. Oh no you do not want LENOVO. They have BIOS level malware and stuff right now. This is on consumer line products. Nothing in the Think line is affected by that. Think line is business focused and still has some ties to IBM which places restrictions on what Lenovo can do with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fusi0n Posted August 19, 2015 Share Posted August 19, 2015 Get a cheap Dell Poweredge 2900 off ebay.. then buy a new cpu and ram for it.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
remixedcat Posted August 19, 2015 Share Posted August 19, 2015 Get a cheap Dell Poweredge 2900 off ebay.. then buy a new cpu and ram for it.. Lots of those got DDR2 ECC RAM which is hella expensive. TPreston 1 Share Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted August 20, 2015 MVC Share Posted August 20, 2015 If your looking for something for home lab esxi box.. This is on my list as my next esxi box http://www.thinkmate.com/system/superserver-5028d-tn4t http://www.wiredzone.com/supermicro-servers-compact-embedded-processor-sys-5028d-tn4t-10024470 http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/midtower/5028/sys-5028d-tn4t.cfm But I think its a bit over your budget? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Haggis Veteran Posted August 24, 2015 Author Veteran Share Posted August 24, 2015 sorry not been online much to reply to this So i started a new job so want to have a bit or resource on the server to play about with stuff So we are looking at Windows Server 2016 for testing and getting to know A Linux Variation with Weblogic, and a few other in house products Windows Server 2012 again for a few in house products Apache, Weblogic, JBOSS, Plex So i have 6Gb in the N54L just now but i feel the CPU is the bottleneck here Once i had installed Server 2016 i noticed a difference in the running of my other VM's maybe i just had configuration slightly wrong Also now after reading have realised that ESXi does not deal with software raid and i dont have any PCI-e slots free for a raid controller so there is also a space issue Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted August 24, 2015 MVC Share Posted August 24, 2015 (edited) why do you think you need raid at all in a esxi setup? I was not aware this was an enterprise production setup where critical stuff was running that had to be up 24/7 even with the loss of a disk? If so that budget is pretty freaking small Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Haggis Veteran Posted August 24, 2015 Author Veteran Share Posted August 24, 2015 The budget is just for the server itself Its not production but as i stated above i want to be able to play about with stuff for new job. so i want to learn more about raid It all kinda comes down to the Processor being not so powerful The RAM i can bump to 16gb if needed, i have 4 bays for HDD to play with and will be moving ESXi and its VM's to an SSD i have Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted August 24, 2015 MVC Share Posted August 24, 2015 (edited) you can play with software raid, lvm, zfs, etc.. windows drive spaces, etc. etc.. None of that requires hardware. Just attach disks to your OS in vm and raid away Some bs raid controller you put in your esxi host is not going to be enterprise grade and not going to help you learn much of anything anyway. But with virtual disks on your different OSes you can play with all kinds of failures. Just delete a disk, etc.. You can make the disks look as big as you want say 4TB each using thin then they don't use any real space, etc. If you want raw map your drives to your VM and do the software raid that way as well. With virtual disks you could have your raid system look like you have 20 disks, etc.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TPreston Posted August 24, 2015 Share Posted August 24, 2015 (edited) Or you could pay like 50$ and attach one of these to any pc and let it do all the hard work for you http://www.ebay.com/itm/462862-B21-462919-001-HP-Smart-Array-P410-512MB-SAS-Controller-w-BBWC-Cables-/381297179367?hash=item58c7153ae7 Even the P812 which is a sodding 24 port sas card which has 1 gig of flash backed memory is down to like $139.99 Edited August 24, 2015 by TPreston Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
REM2000 Posted August 24, 2015 Share Posted August 24, 2015 I just brought a dell xps desktop and loaded it up with large data hard disks, it's an i5 quad core with 16gb ram with the option to hit 32gb if I need it. I find it powerful enough for all my home lab play abouts. I wouldn't overthink it too much if it's a lab then the data doesn't matter and real enterprise stuff is gonna be too expensive. I didnt go the server route as they are too noisey and restrictive on cost, I.e you need ecc ram sas drives etc... It's a home lab so I don't care as long as I can run win2k16, exchange 16 and eventually share point as well as testing Unix / Linux stuff Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
binaryzero Posted September 2, 2015 Share Posted September 2, 2015 (edited) LOL, anything is more powerful than that pissy CPU in those N54Ls.... I would most def setup RAID. Skip the SSD and get yourself some nice SAS disks. www.dell.com Edited September 2, 2015 by Jared- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+BudMan MVC Posted September 2, 2015 MVC Share Posted September 2, 2015 (edited) Raid for what?? Other than extra cost?? And no SSD.. nonsense... SSDs are fantastic FAST datastore disks.. SAS drives for a home lab - can you say wasted money?? The only possible purpose for raid in a esxi home lab box would be to raid 0 your datastore SSDs Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
binaryzero Posted September 2, 2015 Share Posted September 2, 2015 (edited) Performance of RAID 0 over SAS disks (which if you purchase with a box from say Dell or HP are reasonably priced) run fantastic. Fast memory and CPU also helps. I'd do anything for performance in those micro servers...So yeah I can see why you're always going on about SSD. Out of the 15 odd clients I manage (work for an MSP), SSDs are in their workstations\laptops yes, but in their servers, no. If it's a smaller company, SAS disks in a box in RAID config (you'd be stupid not too). Bigger clients, SAS disks in SAN. No SSD. VMs live on either config, and yeah, no performance issues at all... At least be realistic in a home lab... It's like when you're not using vCenter with an ESXi host, you're missing out on a ton of features, including the vSphere web console... VMware do offer trials, and if you search under a few rocks I'm sure you can work out how to get an extended eval period suitable for home use. Same goes for SCVMM and Hyper-V. Sure learn the slim versions, but when you're hired for a job and you're thrown in front of the full blown console expecting to know what you're doing, you don't want to break a sweat on the first day... Anyways 32GB RAM and 4 x whatever flavour disks tickle your fancy in a RAID 0 or 1 config (you said you want to learn about RAID). ESX and vSphere 6, Server 2012 R2, SophosUTM, boom you're laughing. Edited September 2, 2015 by Jared- Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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