<$500 old VM hardware vs a new build similarly priced

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LightningCrash

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I have a rack and plenty of AC power, I run a lot of Xen and KVM stuff.

I see a lot of 16 and 32GB servers going on eBay for $500 and under and I can't help but wonder if the older tech is worth it.
For instance, I saw a Sun v40z with 4ea dual core opterons, no drives and 16GB of RAM for $329

right now there's a Sun v40z , 4ea Opteron 848, 32GB RAM, 2ea FC HBAs and no drives, for under $500

I can get two SCSI drives no problem.

I just wonder if a newer build will absolutely dwarf these options? I haven't really kept up on the latest hexacores or anything. It seems like I'd be out $500 for just a low-end hexacore, mobo and 8GB of RAM.

Is there a compelling reason to go with a newer build?

Is the market for the old boxes just really undersold?

Give me your thoughts... I just want to make sure I'm not missing anything obvious.
 
That's what I did, but not as old. I got 2 servers with dual 2214HE opterons in a 2U case with PSU for 110$ each. Found a deal for 10 x 2GB of reg/ecc ram for 190$ and some 250GB sata drives for the hot swap bays. I can also upgrade to quad cores when I need more processing power. So far between the 2 I'm running 2-AD servers, Exchange 2010, SQL 2008, System Center VMM & SCE & SOC, DPM 2010, ubuntu, and sharepoint 2010. Plus I still have some ram left. This is perfect for my home test lab to test software and different scenarios. It does however use more power than current technology and is obviously slower.

So if you are just looking for something as a test lab, it would work great. For a production environment that is on 24/7, I would spend the extra for newer hardware.
 
The downside to older hardware is that the CPU may not support newer features. Fault Tolerance, for example, needs certain CPU features.
 
Biznatch said:
This is perfect for my home test lab to test software and different scenarios. It does however use more power than current technology and is obviously slower.

So if you are just looking for something as a test lab, it would work great. For a production environment that is on 24/7, I would spend the extra for newer hardware.
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You're right, It would use quite a bit more power... IIRC the v40s have redundant 760W PSUs. I didn't really think about that. That would be around $70/mo in electricity at a 600W load.

It would just be a home lab environment: Testing apache, nginx clusters etc.

Child of Wonder said:
The downside to older hardware is that the CPU may not support newer features. Fault Tolerance, for example, needs certain CPU features.
Click to expand...

You know I've read about the NUMA hotplug stuff and I have yet to find anything that supports it at all. Basically I've found that if I want to replace a CPU board on a live system I would need a SPARC box of some sort and Solaris.
 
using real stuff is cool and all but what about making a good box. like my amd rig if you bought used stuff
am3 board $60ish
athlon x4 $60
ram 8gb $160

and you have modern stuff power efficient and easy to part out or use as another ws when done. hyperv might be better for harware support, if you use vmware you need to get a raid card and some supported nics like a dell perc 5i and a intel dual port nic.
 
I think there is a plus/minus in using old stuff:

Cons:
1) Old stuff (opteron 2xx/8xx) stuff has no hardware VT support. If you are going to run xen (I can highly reccomend xenserver or xcp) with paravirtualized linux guests only this doesn't matter
2) Old server stuff is power hungry
3) Old server stuff may not support 64-bit (604 xeons come to mind).

Pros for old server stuff vs new desktop stuff
1) real enterprise features (from dells/hp's) like remote console, remote virtual media, etc.
2) built in stuff for "free" like scsi backplanes/drive bays
3) rack ready
4) super cheap

With that said, I was given 2 DL380 G3's. They don't support 64-bit. I use them as freebsd nfs/smb boxes w/ ZFS. It required a LOT of kernel twewaking to get stable how I like them. They aren't fast but they do the job, and if I stick a box at my parents house 50 miles away & they lose power I can remotely power it on as long as their cable modem comes on.

I picked up Patriot 2GB pc3200 sticks for those boxes @$30 ea. shipped and u320 drives (10k, 146GB) for $42 ea. shipped.

Are those going to touch my phenom 2 940 VM cluster in speed? Not a chance. Do they have better remote managent and better tested components? Probably...
 
Yeah I was thinking two internal Ultra320 drives and then a PCI-X esata card to a JBOD for 1TB SATA drives.
I know Norco used to have a huge 4u eSATA JBOD chassis with port multipliers on the cheap. They also had a 12-bay unit with 3ea SFF-8087 plugs

The v40zs have the awesome SSH console like the DL380s you mention.

Of course KVM requires VT support... which sucks for the v40zs.
 
Take a look on ebay for Rackable Systems. There are some cheap servers that arent that old. The 2 I bought looked brand new, without a spec of dust anywhere. If you want the specific auction, PM me as I know some forums frown on links to ebay.
 
@dmin said:
using real stuff is cool and all but what about making a good box. like my amd rig if you bought used stuff
am3 board $60ish
athlon x4 $60
ram 8gb $160

and you have modern stuff power efficient and easy to part out or use as another ws when done. hyperv might be better for harware support, if you use vmware you need to get a raid card and some supported nics like a dell perc 5i and a intel dual port nic.
Click to expand...

This is my exact combo for my "server". AM3 mobo/cpu combo from Microcenter and 8GB of ram and onboard RAID5 with 3 1TB hd's. Great for just a home lab. The "server" runs Server 2008 R2 and I have Server 2008R2 Web, Two Server 2003's - one for AD,DHCP,DNS, and one for Exchange 2007. Then I have a few installs of XP Performance edition which run Call of Duty, Counter Strike, and UT3 servers each. They all run in hyper-v. With everything running I still have 3gigs of ram left.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by @dmin
using real stuff is cool and all but what about making a good box. like my amd rig if you bought used stuff
am3 board $60ish
athlon x4 $60
ram 8gb $160

and you have modern stuff power efficient and easy to part out or use as another ws when done. hyperv might be better for harware support, if you use vmware you need to get a raid card and some supported nics like a dell perc 5i and a intel dual port nic.

This is my exact combo for my "server". AM3 mobo/cpu combo from Microcenter and 8GB of ram and onboard RAID5 with 3 1TB hd's. Great for just a home lab. The "server" runs Server 2008 R2 and I have Server 2008R2 Web, Two Server 2003's - one for AD,DHCP,DNS, and one for Exchange 2007. Then I have a few installs of XP Performance edition which run Call of Duty, Counter Strike, and UT3 servers each. They all run in hyper-v. With everything running I still have 3gigs of ram left.
Click to expand...

I have a similiar setup, AMD Quad, 8GB memory, works great! I use Starwind iSCSI software on my WHS box with disks that aren't added to the normal WHS Pool, and create iSCSI targets..works great.
 
Vader said:
I have a similiar setup, AMD Quad, 8GB memory, works great! I use Starwind iSCSI software on my WHS box with disks that aren't added to the normal WHS Pool, and create iSCSI targets..works great.
Click to expand...

My setup at home consists of two ESXi servers. One runs an AMD 405e X3 with 8GB RAM, the other has a 600e X4 with 8GB RAM. Each has a dedicated 1Gb link to my file server which serves out a 4x250GB RAID 10 array over iSCSI.

The setup runs great and, best of all, doesn't draw a ton of power.
 
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