[HECnet] Sort of off-topic, co-locating area 8

[John H. Reinhardt]

See my comments below.

This is what I bought for my own VM servers:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&objectID=c00715072&jumpid=reg_r1002_usen_c-001_title_r0001

HP DL360 Gen 5.   I have two I got on Ebay.   Total cost about $1100 US.   If my Pounds/Dollar conversion is about right, that's about the same as the DL380 you found.   Two DL360's would fit in the same 2U rack space and give you some redundancy. Plus a lot more horsepower.

Mine are configured as follows:
    2 Intel Xeon Quad core E5345 2.33Ghz processors
    16GB memory
    6 73GB SAS drives in a RAID 10 (3 mirrors, striped over the mirror) which yields me about 200GB space.

I run VMWare ESXi 5 on both.   Why?   Because it's free, it works reasonably well and I'm lazy.   It would probably be more efficient to put a stripped Linux and VirtualBox but it's nice to be able to just create a VM with a few measly clicks.   The downside is that I have to run the VMWare vSphere Client on a Windows platform.   In this case it's Windows 7 running on my Mac Pro inside a VMWare Fusion VM.


John H. Reinhardt

On 1/22/2013 9:13 PM, sampsa at mac.com wrote:
Actually, I think I'll go for something like this:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-Proliant-DL380-G5-2x-Quad-Core-Xeon-2-66Ghz-32GB-RAM-SAS-SATA-RAID-x64-Server-/140830204595?pt=UK_Computing_Servers&hash=item20ca2262b3

Could probably run a few FreeAXP / PersonalAlpha instances on that too.

With the 32GB memory (expensive, compare the Ebay prices for 16GB) you'd have plenty to throw at VM's and with 8 cores, plenty of those, too.   A tad expensive, but decent machines. The HP Proliants aren't bad for PC's
sampsa






On 23 Jan 2013, at 04:03, Cory Smelosky<b4 at gewt.net>   wrote:

On 22 Jan 2013, at 21:00, sampsa at mac.com wrote:

Guys,

I've decided to move out of the UK but will keep all the machines in area 8 running by renting a 1/3rd rack from a colo provider.

At the moment I have an iMac running a bunch of VM's and SIMH instances including GORVAX that I was thinking about replacing with a 2U server, and found this on eBay:
For some reason i'm imagining you coloing an iMac G4   ;)

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-SE1102-Twin-Quad-Core-2-5Ghz-12GB-RAM-1U-SATA-RAID-Server-L5420-Xeon-VMware-/121049692102?pt=UK_Computing_Servers&hash=item1c2f1fb7c6

Would that make a decent VMWare / SIMH host?

Not a bad system. Might want a bit more memory, depending on how many VM you plan to run.   It's got a lot of cores to spread around though.
Seems okay, but: http://www.weirdstuff.com/cgi-bin/item/386355-2 Cluster 'em and grab RAM for them. ;)

Not as good.   Older processor, single core.   You'd need 6-8 of these to equal the # of cores as the HP. More rack space, electricity, cooling and costs more.


--
Cory Smelosky
http://gewt.net/ Personal stuff!
http://gimme-sympathy.org/ My permanently-a-work-in-progress pet project.