Recommend out-of-box Dell server for ESXi development lab

Guys -

I'm looking at purchasing a server for our department to be an ESXi host. We develop applications for Industrial Automation, and our systems are growing in complexity. We need something to run multiple virtual machines for development and test out. Because this is a lab a local data store should be fine, we backup our applications regularly so if the VM were to crap out it's not that critical to development, just a hassle if it were to happen. Granted if there is an easy (cheap) way to backup VM's I'm all ears.

I can see the host needing to run 4 - 10 VM's at any given time, maybe more if we have multiple projects large projects in development at the same time, but certainly no more than 15 (this is a stretch and me considering future needs). Again because it's just a lab environment, they won't be doing much work at all so I'm really not sure how much horsepower they really need. I just want to make sure that the experience of development within the virtual machine environment is quick and responsive.

I am not sure what CPU (I assume quad-core)is best for this application, 32GB of ram seems to be a good starting point. I'm unsure of hard drives and Raid setup to go with. I would think 2 TB in raid 0 would be best performance and be plenty of room to house the VM's. I would like install ESXi on a USB drive or internal SD card, NICs are important so need at least 4.

I am just gaining experience with ESXi, recently purchased a Mac Mini and am running 5.1 on it, so I understand all the inner workings. Because this is for work I want a pre-packaged solution for support and warranty. Has to be Dell because that is what our corporate has pricing agreements with.

Looking at a Tower configuration at the moment, although a rack system might be considered if the cost of the rack and accessories are reasonable.

Realistic Budget at this point is $4000. Thoughts?

@OP

Considering this is a test/development lab, and unless you need support from Dell, you may wish to consider a Dell C1100.

T110 II if you need a single CPU( E3-1230) and 32GB of ram.

T320 if you need single CPU (E5-2450) and scaling up to 192GB ram

T620 if you want a serious workhorse, use the E5-2650s and add as much ram as you need (can scale to 768GB ram)

There doesn't seem to be a big price difference between the T320 and T620.

Any opinions on CPU selection? I have no idea what I should consider.

I'd go slower for the test lab, personally. Its just test/dev

With a 4k budget, I'd probably go T320 with a 6 core cpu. Maybe buy your own memory, I put 48gb in mine for about what dell would charge for 16gb.

Go solid state for the datastores and as much memory as possible, CPU isn't overly important especially for a test rig.

@thread

Just because the OP has $4K to spend, doesn't mean he has to spend all of it.

@OP

With that budget, you could get two C1100s and a SAN node (if you don't have one spare) to test teleporting and failover.

I can recommend the Dell T420. We just took delivery of one these servers which has 64 GB Ram, 2 x Xeon processors and 4 x 1 TB of drives which we will expand to 8 drives over the next year. Cost was just under $3500.00 a couple of months ago. We use Hyper-V 2012 and the virtual machines run flawlessly...and fast.

parityboy said:

@thread

With that budget, you could get two C1100s and a SAN node (if you don't have one spare) to test teleporting and failover.

Click to expand...

I would love do have a setup like this, however I know our department isn't ready for that, it would be great to have for a project that requires us to supply HA/Fail over but those don't come around that often 1-2, ever couple of years.

Plus, I would assume you would only be able to do this with the 60 day license of ESXi? I wouldn't have any budget to keep licensing updated just for the sake of testing fail-over.

Their R310s and R620s are great too, Both are 1u so if you do get a rack they don't take up much room.
Whatever you got make sure to get it with the enterprise drac and sd card. The drac makes it easy to reconfigure without needing to to have a monitor + keyboard and mouse connected to the server. You can install esxi on the sd card and just use the local drives all for guest storage.
For backing the guests up, Veeam has a free edition for backing up esxi and hyper-v. It doesn't have scheduling, but it will do backups whenever you start them. There are some scripts out there that will backup guests, like ghettovcb if you want to go that route.

Paully's5.0 said:

<snipped for brevity>
Because this is for work I want a pre-packaged solution for support and warranty.
Has to be Dell because that is what our corporate has pricing agreements with.

<snipped for brevity>
Realistic Budget at this point is $4000. Thoughts?

Click to expand...

If budget = "use it or lose by end of fiscal year", then T620
If budget = "yours 'til spent", then T110-II

You want Dell support/warranty ... this is hardware only, right?

Buy two identical T110-II for ~1800
1 will have 32GB RAM (active machine) , the other 2GB (spare machine).
Move 1TB drive from spare to active.
Purchase 2 SSD drives (240-512GB range) and add to active machine.

Spread 10-15 VMs across the two SSDs only and use the 1TB drives for
backups/snapshots or move them to a cheap diskless two bay NAS for remote
storage.

or

Spread 10-15 VMs across all four drives with the VMs requiring the
highest IOPS on the SSDs and the remainder on the 1TB mechanical drives.

The only items not supported would be the SSD drives.

If you know for sure...100%... your memory needs for 15 VMs will not exceed 32GB
memory limit of the T110-II, you are likely set. Any doubts, skip the T110.

or

Thought I would post an update, finally ordering this server!

I had to buy everything from Dell (limits the red-tape) and the boss wanted some "upgrades".

Ended up going with the Dell T-420. The primary reason for the T-420 was that I couldn't use hot-swap drives. Per suggestions I will be adding 2 Crucial M4 512GB SSD drives. I discovered that you can't buy the hot-swap tray to convert a 2.5 SSD to a 3.5 drive as an accessory from Dell directly. Yes you can order elsewhere but again red-tape. The T-420 offers the cabled hard drive option, and we don't really need raid or "hot-swap" drives. So that allowed me to reallocate those dollars elsewhere

- Dual E5-2440 CPUs (over-kill but the boss said if we are spending the money, spend a bit more).
- 64 GB 1600 MHz Ram
- 1 TB SATA Hard Drive
- Dual SD Cards
- ESXi
- DVD Rom Drive
- Additional Broadcom 5720 DP Card

- 2 Crucial M4 Drives to be added separately.

So the 1 TB Drive will be a "repository" for past project VMs (probably get a Drobo or Synology NAS next year). The 2 M4 drives will run most of the VMs with the 1 TB drive running anything that is low disk-usage.

Final price was around $4200 so I think this is perfect for our needs and gives us plenty of room to grow. I think the limiting factor right now is hard disk space, but with SSD's dropping in price I can easily see adding another 1 TB of SSD space in 2 years, and using a NAS to back things up as needed. 2 TBs for "Lab" type VMs should cover a lot of projects.

Probably over-kill right now but shouldn't have to worry about it for a long time.

A little background, I work for an industrial automation provider. Virtualization is crossing into our world so we need the tools to mimic solutions we are being asked to deliver. It used to be that we would supply all the servers and computers required but now with Virtualiztion IT departments are taking more and more ownership in acquiring hardware/software at the manufacturing level and it's architecture (we no longer have complete control of the project, therefore our hands can be tied at times). We simply can't wait for them to supply the components to develop on, so we need to invest in our own servers/virutalization environment to move projects forward.