New hardware at work

[[JiF]Mike]

It took me months to get this approved but I finally have most of the parts and am starting to install software. I even got a license for VMWare so we'll be rocking full virtualization soon! Some pretty cool stuff. (wiring is a bit messy as it's in my office for building/testing)



For the geeks out there like me that want to know specs

If you have experience with any of this I would love to hear your thoughts on the direction I am going. I worked with a vendor for weeks to get all this together. This is over $30,000 worth of equipment and software. For a little non-profit like us, it's a hell of an investment that we hope will give us years of service.

There are two identical Lenovo RD330 servers:
Dual Intel Xeon E5-2407's (32 logical processors)
64GB DDR3 RAM

Storage is handled by the Overland SnapSAN S1000 with six 600GB 15k rpm SAS drives configured into two RAID5 arrays with 1.2TB of useable space each. The Overland storage is connected to the servers using a segmented VLAN with a Dell 2820 gigabit managed switch (with a backup controller and a backup switch).

Server two will be a replica of server one for redundancy in case of failure. If I get it all configured correctly! lol Lots and lots of redundancy. My weakest link at the moment seems to be the USB drives I am booting the servers off of for the VMWare host (ESXi v5.1). I'm going to get a few more though and make copies. Hopefully that will reduce or eliminate that risk.

For testing purposes I started loading Windows Server 2012. Went across the hall to make a K-cup coffee. When I sat back down the install was done! I'm just playing with everything in a lab environment right now. I told the boss it would probably take me a month to move our existing servers as I've got lots of learning still. I'll probably mess a lot of things up before I'm ready to go live. She was fine with that.

[[JiF] General WarHawk]

Wow, considering the average K-cup takes 3-4 minutes from click to coffee, and adding in the trip across the hall, that is one fast install. My Win7 and WinXP64, I was able to make 2 cups of regular cocoa from a package, get cold, then get reheated, then get cold again, before I screwed it up, and had to restart.


I wish I could wire the house for Fiber. Especially since FIOS is coming to the neighbor hood this summer.