Considering C1100 for vmware (vsphere) at home

N

nethole

n00b
Joined
Mar 26, 2012
Messages
9
I'm considering the purchase of multiple http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerE...263261?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item3cd0b0761d or alternatively one http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerE...969100?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item3cda079a4c In order to get myself much more familiar with vmware (and eventually openstack). I believe there's a 32 GB limit for versions older than 5.1(ish) [for freebee folks like myself]. I'll likely be going with version 6, so the ram limitation may not be an issue. I'm thinking that having the multiple platforms will make self training with the various migration and aggregation resources easier. I am concerned about noise and power. But, for the price, I have to make some compromizes.

Would these items be suitable candidates for the prices? Has anyone else used these particular servers (or perhaps made lower priced bids from this vendor?).

If I go this route, disk storage will be the next aquisition (so feel free to point out gotchas so I can be aware of them now)

My intent is to create something suitable for training for myself for near a grand. (plus or minus),


---
also considering a 4 node 6100 http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerE...690674?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item51bddc6d32
 
Last edited:
As an eBay Associate, HardForum may earn from qualifying purchases.
Dude, the C1100 sound like a jet taking off. Unless you put it in a shed you'll hear that thing run no matter where you are in the house.

For a home lab I run nested ESXi in Workstation. You can do most things nested and you don't have to pay up for the gear, the power, and put up with the noise.

I can't recommend the C1100 for home use. I just bought a bunch of them at work and they really belong in a data center due to the noise levels.
 
Look at the C6100 if you haven't already. Tons of information on www.servethehome.com (may be temporarily unavailable) and their forums.

Mine was $800 for 4 machines, 8 L5520s, and 96GB of RAM.

2U fans means it's not as loud. Some people replace the fans with quieter units, but I didn't feel the need to. It's definitely not quiet, but for a rack server it's not bad.

Since it's 4 machines in one box, you can use 3 as hypervisor hosts and the 4th as a storage server.
 
markwo said:
Since it's 4 machines in one box, you can use 3 as hypervisor hosts and the 4th as a storage server.
Click to expand...

The 6100s have limits on the drive bays though...Like each blade only has 3 hdd bays and no raid.

The C1100s have 4 bays and no hardware raid. So your OS will see each drive individually unless you buy a raid card. I ran a M1015 and a Dell PERC raid card both worked fine until I needed more than 4 bays.

The C1100s are not too noisy if you have them in a cool space. My garage is swamp cooled and both of my C1100s spin at lowest fan speed. My C1100s are loaded with 72GB of ram and dual L550s. These things are monsters as VM servers.
 
You can reconfigure the cabling in the C6100s to change the number of of disks per server (but not arbitrarily). IIRC, moving 6 to one sled just requires moving a cable.

I've seen people do all 12 on one, but it required some customization.

I use an external box for storage so I never dug too far into it. If I were doing it in one box I'd probably use FreeNAS and ZFS and skip the raid controller, but people use them too.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top