Dell Poweredge T110

I am looking at buying a Dell Poweredge T110 and installing ESXI so I will have something I can lab with. My question is does any one here have any experience with this machine or can give me advice on how many VM machines I will be able to roughly run on it? I will be using it mostly to lab for my Microsoft exams for now.

The specs I was looking at are below:
CPU- X3430 Xeon Processor, 2.4 GHz 8M Cache, Turbo
Memory - 2GB Memory (1x2GB), 1333MHz Single Ranked UDIMM
Hard Drive - 250GB 7.2k RPM Serial ATA

I can get this for about $430 I think with tax & shipping. I was looking at buying an additional 8gb to go with it from somewhere else since dell is outrageous on ram, and I have some additional hard drives laying around in the 500gb range I can add to it as well. Any advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

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Comments

nhan.ng

max out the ram when you get it. I believe it'll support up to 16gig of ram. I dont have this server so im just going off based on spec.

what about storage for ESXi, how u plan on doing that?

Tackle

I have a T110. Same processor your looking at, but I uped the ram to either from dell to 1 stick of 4GB or 2 of 2GB, can't remember. Crucial has some good prices on T110 ram. I think it's like $115 for 2, 4GB sticks (8GB). So you'd be at 12GB of ram. We use their RAM at work in a T110.

The ram and disk will by far be your greatest bottlenecks. It has 4 spots for disks in the chasis, I would recommend using all 4 available. Right now I have 3 disks that I bought when they were on sale (1-300GB 7200, 1-500GB 7200, and 1-750GB 5400). I do notice a difference between the 5400rpm and 7200rpm disks. I use my 5400 as a storage drive pretty much (VM Backups, ISO's)

I notice the VM's start to slow down a bit once I have more than 2 running on a disk.

As for how many VM's you will be able to run, you'll need to figure that out on your own. Here are some tips:

- I recommend no more than 3 VM's per disk. 2 is optimal for me
- The host ESXi 4.1 uses 700mb to 1GB of ram just sitting idle (That would mena you could run maybe 1 Server if you only have 2GB)
- XP VM's run fine on 384-512mb of ram for general use
- Server OS's should be given as much ram as you can allocate
- Look into getting a SAN or NAS. At work we use Openfiler (Free). Our two SANS have 16 disks a piece. But you could set one up with an old P4 box with as many drives as it can hold.

RobertKaucher

Is this a home lab or a production system?

If it is a home lab I would seriously consider just buying an i7 desktop and making sure it can do at least 8 GB RAM. The cost of ECC RAM compared to DDR 3 or whatever is just insane (regardless of where you get it) and I cannot imagine that ECC would really give you anything worth the extra cash for a home lab.

tbgree00

RobertKaucher wrote: »

Is this a home lab or a production system?

If it is a home lab I would seriously consider just buying an i7 desktop and making sure it can do at least 8 GB RAM. The cost of ECC RAM compared to DDR 3 or whatever is just insane (regardless of where you get it) and I cannot imagine that ECC would really give you anything worth the extra cash for a home lab.

ESXi can be a little picky about the hardware in the machine, though I can't truely speak to that, I've only heard people say that. I may try to install it on my old desktop just to see. If he buys VMware Workstation you can run ESXi in that but a new desktop + workstation likely costs more than that server itself.

I also have the T110. I got it with 2x2GB and just ordered two more. I'm only putting 8 in for budget and also because free ESXi 5 only supports 8GB vRam anyway so if I update I may as well only hit that maximum.

RobertKaucher

tbgree00 wrote: »

ESXi can be a little picky about the hardware in the machine, though I can't truely speak to that, I've only heard people say that. I may try to install it on my old desktop just to see. If he buys VMware Workstation you can run ESXi in that but a new desktop + workstation likely costs more than that server itself.

I also have the T110. I got it with 2x2GB and just ordered two more. I'm only putting 8 in for budget and also because free ESXi 5 only supports 8GB vRam anyway so if I update I may as well only hit that maximum.

Totally valid point. I had issues with a desktop model once, due to the NIC. I did not realize ESXi only supports 8GB vRAM... Wow. We now have a potential mega problem at my work. Might have to move to Hyper-V Server. We need 8 GB RAM for our SharePoint WFE and DB servers. Really 8 GB is probably more than we need now, but that gives us almost no room to grow...

Thanks!

JustinEdw

Thanks everyone for the helpful replies.

I went ahead and ordered one with just the 2gb from dell, and turned around and order 2x4gb sticks of ram from newegg. I am going to purchase 2 more 4gb sticks that way it will bring me up to 16gb. But I got to wait for payday on the 31st before I can afford anymore

.

But seeing that ESXI 5 now has 8gb vram limitation kind of sucks. I may have to look into using something else. I liked vmware for its small footprint with that kind of limitation and no cheap license kind of makes it useless.

nhan.ng

Just use 4.1 so you wont have the problem with vram issue

Tackle

nhan.ng wrote: »

Just use 4.1 so you wont have the problem with vram issue

Agreed. We will be on 4.1 until we find a better option. No way are we going to drop the amount of cash needed to get all our servers licensed.

Can I ask what ram you got off of newegg? Maybe post a link? I think the servers are pretty specific and the cheapest I could find like I said was 8GB for $115.

RobertKaucher

JustinEdw wrote: »

Thanks everyone for the helpful replies.

I went ahead and ordered one with just the 2gb from dell, and turned around and order 2x4gb sticks of ram from newegg. I am going to purchase 2 more 4gb sticks that way it will bring me up to 16gb. But I got to wait for payday on the 31st before I can afford anymore .

But seeing that ESXI 5 now has 8gb vram limitation kind of sucks. I may have to look into using something else. I liked vmware for its small footprint with that kind of limitation and no cheap license kind of makes it useless.

Many people are not aware that it exists but there is a free Hyper-V Server (not the Windows Server product, just the hypervisor).

Microsoft Hyper-V Server: Home Page

It is managed similar to the Server Core Installation.

it_consultant

RobertKaucher wrote: »

Many people are not aware that it exists but there is a free Hyper-V Server (not the Windows Server product, just the hypervisor).

Microsoft Hyper-V Server: Home Page

It is managed similar to the Server Core Installation.

I run this on one of my networks for my admin and test servers. It has worked without hiccup for over a year. This may be a shocker but I have to reboot ESX servers about 2x a year, this windows server has never been rebooted...which probably means it needs windows updates.

JustinEdw

The cheapest ram I could find was $88.99 with free shipping. Hopefully there are no rules against posting link to this but here is where is what I winded up getting

Newegg.com - Kingston 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered DDR3 1333 (PC3 10600) Server Memory Model KVR1333D3E9SK2/8G

I am going to buy one more after the 31st when I get paid so I can bring the server up to 16gb, and probably purchase one 500gb 7200rpm drive unless I can find the one I had laying around my desk I somewhere...