Advice for test lab

[jb4479]

It's been several years since I maintained any servers, so I'm setting up a test lab in my office. I've purchased a refurbished HP ML100 G6, with a Xeon x3430 and 16GB of memory. I am wondering if any knows of a good source for the P212 controller. Also what hard drives would someone recommend?

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

ServerSupply.com is where we find a lot of older HP and Dell server and business workstation spare parts.
Just checked...they have a few there from no-battery cache models to ones with the batter cache. I recommend for your learning lab you do get one with the optional battery back cache...it allows higher RAID levels and doing online expansion, which, IMO, are important to learn.

Try to snag a bit more RAM.
As for hard drives, IMO, getting at least 4. Ideally you want a RAID 1 for the host OS...either Hyper-V or ESX and then the system drives of the guests, or a bare metal install. And create a larger second RAID volume, for the data of the bare metal install, or the data volumes of the virtual guests. For larger setups I usually setup that second RAID volume as RAID 10 for better performance.

Learning iLO of HP servers is good too.

 

[jb4479]

Thanks Stone for the reply. I just ordered a controller from server supply (nice price). It's a tower setup so there are only 4 bays. What about these hard drives?

Seagate Constellation ES.3 1TB ST1000NM0023
Seagate Cheetah 300GB SAS ST3300656SS

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

As much as I love and try to only use SAS drives (and I love Cheetahs...they're fast cats!)....I recognize the need for "budget" when doing your own test lab. Even SATA enterprise drives (like the ES series or WD's RE series) can be pricey just for your learning sandbox. Do whatever you want..that your budget allows.

I used to just take old servers that we retired from clients...refurbish them with leftover miscellaneous old drives I could scrounge up at the time. Got lucky a few times and got some Cheetahs..LOL. 15k SCSI...they were screamers...loved the sound of that server powering up from a cold start..and you'd hear each drive spin up one by one.

 

[HCHTech]

.loved the sound of that server powering up from a cold start..and you'd hear each drive spin up one by one.

Haha. Server porn.

 

[MDD1963]

fun hearing the 15k drives spin down in the event of a power loss.....; come back into the room 10 minutes later, and still spinning down!

 

[HCHTech]

I worked a summer in a manufacturing plant before I went to college. They made rings for jet engines. They had what seemed like some pretty high-tech stuff for the '70's. There was a huge machine that did something, I never found out what exactly, but it had about a 5-foot diameter flywheel that spun up to some incredible speeds. It was inside of a large housing, so you couldn't see it spinning, but you could sure hear it. It sounded like a muted siren spinning up, it took about 5 minutes to reach full speed. Then, whenever they powered down the machine, that thing would spin for what seemed like 30 minutes. All the while lowering slowly in pitch as it spun down. I remember being fascinated and a little afraid of it.

 

[Craka]

Like JB4479 it has been some time a number of years since I've had anything to do with servers. I would like to set up a test lab at home, pretty much dealt soley with IBM xSeries machines in the past. Guess I'd be look at purchasing a IBM or HP server but not sure how old would be too old to use in test lab for experience/educational purposes. The last server OS I had anything to do with was Windows Server 2003.
Recommendations/comments?

 

[bluecoast]

Hyper-V or ESXi is great for learning, you can take a snapshot then mess a server up and just restore the snapshot to undo any changes. It also allows you to run many machines on 1 piece of hardware saving money as well.

I'm becoming more of a fan of SSD's for test labs and starting to put a few in production servers. Samsung 850's are cheap and work great for a test lab. Things run faster which saves time. I run 4 of them in a dell with ESXi for testing stuff out. They blow SAS drives out of the water in the performance department. Bear in mind though, that some older RAID controllers don't play nice with the newer SSD's. I think on one pair of SSD's I have 3 or 4 machines running and they are all very fast, faster then each of them on a dedicated 10k drive.

The more RAM the better. I started at 16 and have slowly bumped it up to 48gb as the number of VM's grew. Check to see what it maxes out at and work towards that, keep in mind some servers cannot take a full 16gb stick. For a test environment, you could get away with non-ECC ram to save a few dollars. a quick search showed the ml100 maxes out at 24gb so not too much room for more ram.