Blade Deployment

Hey all,

I am in need of some advice. My work place has indicated that they will provide me with the next decommissioned blade if they can afford to do so. I intend to set up a lab environment and they seemed receptive to the idea as the device would be scrapped anyway. I have never actually worked with a blade other than remote backups and other basic software based tasks.

Once I get this blade, what type of hardware should I generally expect? Would it be reasonable to expect a blade to be able to support a few VMs? What kind of hard drive do they usually take, will I need to buy a rack, etc. etc. I am basically looking for some starter information that I can use when setting this thing up. Any advice would be helpful. Sorry if this is vague, but as I have no idea what condition the blade will be in or what kind it is, I cannot provide much.

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Comments

dave330i

Unless they're giving you a chassis as well, it'll cost you a fortune.

About7Narwhal

dave330i wrote: »

Unless they're giving you a chassis as well, it'll cost you a fortune.

Let's assume for the time being that my terminology is incorrect and go with a Rackmount server instead. The unit should be a stand alone with no other parts required (not a hotswap device), so I don't think it has a muli-blade chassis to go with it.

inscom.brigade

one could only hope for a cisco b200, this a complete unit psu,hd,mobo,mem..

https://www.google.com/shopping/product/12045580098364187113?q=cisco%20blade&hl=en&sqi=2&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&bpcl=39314241&biw=1138&bih=630&wrapid=tlif135432392192610&sa=X&ei=01e5UN_5BZG60AHKs4CgCQ&ved=0CHwQ8wIwBg

astorrs

inscom.brigade wrote: »

one could only hope for a cisco b200, this a complete unit psu,hd,mobo,mem..

https://www.google.com/shopping/product/12045580098364187113?q=cisco%20blade&hl=en&sqi=2&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&bpcl=39314241&biw=1138&bih=630&wrapid=tlif135432392192610&sa=X&ei=01e5UN_5BZG60AHKs4CgCQ&ved=0CHwQ8wIwBg

You'd still need to add a UCS Fabric Interconnect, chassis, power supply, a couple fans, an IOXM, and a mezzanine card just to be able to boot and get on the network (assuming no redundancy at all). Even used off ebay that'll run you way >10k.