All mounted

Phew, what a PITA. My only concern now is the fact that it’s leaning, I’m a freak about things like this, even if it’s structurally sound.

Picture:

Home lab: Final pricing

Now that I’ve bought the essentials, final pricing!

HP ProLiant DL145 x4 — 1U 2.2ghz dual processor 80gb storage 1gb RAM $449.96 USD
Extra RAM 1gbx8 $168
Cisco WS-C2950-24 $71 USD
Rack Skeletek C24U $166 USD
Railing $140 USD

——

Total: $995 USD

Inexpensive server rack, I’m dreaming! No I’m not!

So I ended up getting these suckers in the mail yesterday, what a PAIN to unpack. Now I’m waiting for my switch to arrive before I actually set them up. One of the last things I really need is a nice rack for these, but I haven’t found anything cheap that’s under 6 ft tall and under 200 bucks with shipping. Craigslist and eBay have been flops, Newegg has some, but 150 bucks for shipping?! I wouldn’t mind doing a DIY if I could at least have a nice base instead of using those Erector set bars.

**Update** and as of writing this, I found a  Skeletek C24U for $170 with shipping.

Re: My soon to be new home lab

After much consideration and money counting, I am going to get those 4 servers. I spent about an hour and a half last night browsing all of the top PC sites for lowend servers and could not find one that supported AMD-V/V-T. I really plan on going all out with this as I am never going to learn this stuff with my current job. This is just my basic setup, I’ll need to further research older SAN models and FC cards.

Quick Layout of planned setup:

HP DL145 G2 x4
Cisco Layer 3 switch — 2950 or 3550
EMC or NetAPP SAN, Fiber connection to the DL145′s.

My soon to be new home lab

Just found these sweet puppies, HP ProLiant DL145 G2 for 80 bucks a pop. I’m getting around 500 bucks back in my refund, so I’m grabbing 4 of them. While they don’t support FT and AMD-V, it’s definitely something I willing to forego.

Features/Specifications:

• HP ProLiant DL145 G2 Dual Opteron 2.2 GHz 1U Server

• General Features:
• No Operating System
• 1U Rack Mount form factor
• Chipset: AMD 8132 for PCI-X support and NVIDIA nForce Professional 2200 MCP for PCI Express
• Two (2) AMD Opteron 2.2 GHz processors
• 1 GB DDR2 memory (expandable up to 16 GB)
• 80 GB SATA hard drive
• Embedded SATA controller
• No Optical drive
• No floppy drive
• Integrated NVIDIA GeForce2 GPU with 16 MB DDR video memory
• Integrated Dual Broadcom 5721 10/100/1000 network controller (Wake on LAN and PXE capable)
• Embedded SATA Controller
• HP ProLiant Lights Out 100i Remote Management standard
• IPMI 2.0 support
• ROM Setup Utility
• Six (6) Non-hot plug, Non-redundant system fans
• 500W power supply

• Expansion slots:
• Eight (8) DIMM sockets
• One (1) PCI-X slot (on riser card)
• Two (2) PCI-X 133 MHz (one occupied by riser card)
• One (1) PCI Express x16

• I/O ports:
• Four (4) USB 2.0 ports (2 on front/2 on back)
• Three (3) RJ-45 Ethernet ports
• One (1) 15-pin VGA port
• One (1) 9-pin Serial port
• Two (2) PS/2 ports

My home lab

Lots of posts going around on this. I simply have a desktop with a quadcore 2.2ghz Phenom processor and 6gb of RAM, and 2 500gb-sh drives.