|
Dec 17
|
As some of you know I have been heavily into Virtualization for about the last year since I was with SonicWALL. Now with a company that uses a more complex setup with Websense TRITON my virtual lab has been pushed to the limits it can handle and I am needing a more robust and feature-full virtual server to run my virtual server farm for lab testing and learning.
I thought long and hard for what the best components for the money could be and I think I have really hit the sweet-spot. For under $600 which in the server components world is really cheap I was able to pick up a handful of upgrades that will allow me to run and manage my lab more efficiently and allow for growth for a few years.
The heard of the upgrade components that I chose was the Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O Server Mainboard. This board is designed for the new Xeon E3 Socket 1155 processors and has a feature set that screams. I was able to get this board on NewEgg for around $180 which is a steal. This server board offers 4 DDR3 slots which support up to 32GB of ECC Unbuffered RAM, 4 PCI Express x8 slots (two are x4 electrically), four SATA II and two SATA III Ports, and internal USB port, other standard ports and two Gigabit Ethernet LAN ports. On top of that there is a dedicated IPMI port which support IPMI 2.0, KVM over IP, and the ability to attach ISO images out of band for true remote access.
For the brains of the operation I wanted to have a fast and robust processor that did not set me back a few pay checks. I was looking at some of the older Xeon processors which are tried and true but since this is a new build I wanted to pick a newer processor that had the features and speed I needed for my virtual lab. After reading a number of reviews and sites I settled on what seems to be the best bang for the buck the Intel Xeon E3-1230 Server Processor. The Xeon E3-1230 is a Quad Core processor with a clock speed of 3.2Ghz and a Turbo Speed of 3.6GHz. There is a 256KB Layer 2 cache per core and a shared Layer 3 cache of 8MB. The E3-1230 support HyperThreading which give us 8 virtual cores to work with which is going to be plenty for the virtual machines hosted on this build. Though this is a Sandy Bridge processor there is no integrated video which we don’t need for a server build anyway.
The final upgrade for this build is two sets of 8GB (2x4GB) Kingston DDR3 1333MHz ECC RAM(KVR1333D3E9SK2/8G). The server board supports up to 32GB Buffered RAM but with the cheapest 16GB set still well over $300 this upgrade was not cost effective so I opted for two 8GB sets which came to under $150 together. At least I have some more room to upgrade down the road. This set of RAM offers ECC error checking and runs at 1333MHz speeds with a running total of 16GB. With that amount of RAM I can run around eight virtual machines running inside VMWare ESXi 5.0 and about ten if I run them with Citrix Xenserver.
This particular server will be employed running VMWare ESXi 5.0 and I will retire the older parts being replaced into a new setup running Citrix Xenserver. The ESXi host will be running my server operating systems and VPN appliances while the Xenserver host will be home to my Windows and Linux clients. Stay tuned in the next few weeks for pics of the builds, full specs, and screen shots of the setups. I will be also putting together a review of the upgraded components listed above.
I want to thank 
After receiving some new hardware from Overclockersclub.com to review I decided to upgrade my custom server to the new 
I have an Associates Degree in Computer Information Systems, currently working on a Bachelors Degree in Networking Security from the Western Governors University and employed as a Technical Support Analyst at 
