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Hi all,

First of all: I have a confession - I’m no expert on this and I’m quite new to the industry. I would however like to be able to learn more by trying things out myself and I feel would be a good way to start.

I waited a couple of weeks before finally deciding to post this up. I’m looking to set up a home lab with the intention to virtualise. Currently I intend to virtualise a DC, AV, WDS, firewall and a couple of other things. I currently hope to get my hands on a Cisco SG300-10 in terms of a switch.

As for the server itself, I’m having trouble pinning down what I need. I’ve done some research and I’d ideally like to avoid a whitebox solution if I can. I’m not massively fussed if it’s rack/tower but I would like it to be powerful enough so I’m able to add extra VMs without difficulty if I need to test something. I’d prefer to keep the spend at £500-£600 for this, but it’s flexible. I’d appreciate any advice you guys could provide me with.

Thanks.

@VMware @HP @Dell_Technologies

53 Spice ups
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A mid-level workstation would be fine and would probably be more suitable in an environment where you might want to sleep at night. A rack server would be better suited to an environment where you can put it far away from any living quarters. Or you can build a custom box which works fairly well, particularly with Hyper-V or with vSphere 6.0.

Otherwise check out these previous posts:

I personally just use a Lenovo D20 workstation for my lab.

15 Spice ups
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I picked up a Lenovo TS440 on Amazon. Lenovo (at the time) wanted nearly $1400. I got it on Amazon during Cyber Monday for $415. I opted to add a 1TB WD Blue, with 8GB ram, plus bought another 1TB WD Blue (about $80) and a spare caddy ($17) for the second drive. Came out overall to something like $520. Look at deals on Lenovo tower form factors on Amazon, if you do any rack mounts with anyone, the cost increases with almost no performance increase. I would also check out HP and Dell deals for towers. I found the best deal at the time. Make sure you have good amount of ram for a testing environment, about 16GB, a Xeon processor (preferably at least a gen 3 or later). That should give you the best value for your dollar, and give you a good starting point. I’ve had my Lenovo server about a year now, what a work horse for everything I needed including testing, virtualization, HTPC, file server, domain controller, etc. Still not pushing it to its limit on a regular basis.

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Go with a refurbished Dell Optiplex 780 minitower. They are quiet, energy-efficient, inexpensive and can easily accommodate 16GB of memory, a Q9650 quad core CPU and four hard drives with on-board RAID-1 in-hardware support.

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I have used HP Microservers and currently use HP ML310e Gen8 but once you add the maximum 32GB of ram your looking at closer to £900 - there are a few used on eBay though and I can happily run 10-15 VMs including Exchange 2013, SQL a DC, DNS, DHCP, WDS proxy, email filter, spiceworks, IIS, and a couple of other bits.

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This! I use this for my business server. Runs my DVR Camera System, acts as a DC, and have half a dozen other various VM’s on it. I’m going to get another one this fall so that I can have some redundancy.

I purchased it from Newegg for less than $400. Threw in some RAM from Amazon and some drives and I’m still under $1000 for a Tier one class piece of hardware with a years worth of HP’s tech support.

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Just to be clear you are talking about the ML310e and not the Microserver - right?

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HP Microserver Gen8 is affordable, and power draw is acceptable. If you really want to beef it up, some people have replaced the stock Celeron CPU with a Xeon, and maxing out the RAM. Way overkill for home I think, but still cool for bragging rights.

If you want to go all out, get a NAS to set up as an iSCSI target… don’t stop there, run Veeam free edition to back everything up onto a HDD.

It all depends on your budget and requirements. The more dosh you spend, the better the hardware. My requirements are obviously low power for a 24/7 uptime, definitely don’t want a loud rack server drawing too much power all day and night.

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While technically everyone’s right and you can get by on workstation hardware you will likely miss out on some server-specific stuff that is not just useful but that you should learn as well. Of the top of my head iLo (or the Dell equiv). Also, hardware RAID cards, server-ish BIOS’s (dual firmware boot and such).

None of it’s a deal breaker and your lab will run fine as far as the VMs and such but when you first get to real server hardware there will still be some surprises. Might be worth it then to go server in your lab.

My last couple of lab (and even small production) server have been used. I recently picked up a DL360g5 for around $450 from craigslist. You just have to be patient and look for the right deals. I spent two weeks till this showed up but eventually it did.
I’ll up the ram to 32 and swap the P200 for a P400 or 600 and still be under $650-700. (or 64GB and be under $800). The server’s a beast now and will run anything I can need of it at my scale including multiples of VMs a couple of which are remote desktops. Moar RAMs plz! and I’ll be hard pressed to make this thing break a sweat!!

gl.

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Why avoid a white box?

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RAM is going to be key here, if you don’t mind things running a bit slow when you’ve got a few VM running a basic PC with an i3 processor will do the job (that’s how i started).

Maybe look at a Refurb Dell from Ebay or something from their outlet store http://www.dell.com/uk/dfb/p/servers , or was given this link the other day http://www.etb-tech.com/ .

Don’t be scared to buy a cheap server and add extra RAM/HD your self.

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I decided to set up a home lab so last week I bought a Lenovo TS140. Its got a Intel Xeon E3-1226 and 4GB RAM, Lenovo are also currently running a £125 cashback deal so works out at just over £250. I upgraded the RAM to 16GB for around £70 and it seems good enough for my needs running esxi and around 5 VMs at the moment.

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I use a Dell Optiplex 790 mini tower desktop with core i7. I just saw one on Ebay for $355. The specs say it will only support 16gb ram, but i found info in the Dell forums on which memory to get to make 32gb work. It’s out of the way in the corner of my bedroom, so i can say it’s very quiet. I’m sure that Optiplex 990’s are basically the same thing. I see a ton of those on Ebay starting at $350.

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While you could virtualise a firewall, its simpler and arguably better to set up PFSense on a separate machine.

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Do check out the promotions on HP Microservers. Search on ‘hp focus promotions’ as this varies by country and month to month. The standard spec is fairly basic in terms of RAM and HDD so you’ll need to budget to up this.

These come with remote management similar for full size servers which is useful for learning.

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I would ask the same thing… why would you avoid a white box solution? The architecture is standard and given the right case, highly flexible. I order custom made systems all the time (including my, and my Son’s systems) from the same manufacturer, DakTech in Fargo ND… they offer a 7 year warranty and will build anything you want. A one time investment for parts with a warranty of 7 years? Where are you going to beat that with a major manufacturer? You may get by cheaper with a ‘deal’… but if you want something you can build on… tweak… and make a full lab out of… you’re smarter (in my opinion) to go with a white box solution.

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I built my own homelab servers. Memory is the real key here. I went cheap just because I didn’t want to spend a lot of money. I used the AMD AM1 platform. I slowly built four rigs. I used the following:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113366

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157490

2 x of http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231636

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119299

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA4AJ1JJ8217

In one rig I used a 4TB WD drive instead of the SSD and it was my data store for the other virtual hosts. The AM1 platform while not a performance beast can still do virtualization and it is low wattage. Not as low as some Intel offerings but it is so much cheaper up front. With these I can simulate almost any environment I want. The best part is no part is over 50 bucks, so you just buy a part or two each pay period and slowly build out your lab.

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I purchased a Dell PowerEdge 1950 sever about a year ago for lab work at home. It now runs my home AD/DC, Test Sharepoint Server, a Cisco VoIP CUCM server, and a Windows server for web, files, wifi, and minecraft.

The sever was about $100 and it came with two Xeon CPU, 8gb of ram, and two 500GB SAS drives. I bought 16gb of ram and a 1TB hdd for under $100.

Ram is the biggest things that will be used. Not being in production, you will not uses much CPU power so focus on Ram and how much disk space you will need. You would be surprised how much you can do on older cheap hardware.I have seen a lot of people go overboard and then have a bunch of resources sitting around unused, which really defeats the purpose of virtualizing in the first place.

As for the network you can get a lot of practice and learn from software like GNS3 and Cisco Packet Tracer. Best of luck to you.

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Wait, you get to CHOOSE?!

I had to settle for decommissioned servers that were headed to the recycle truck.

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I would go with Lenovo as well. Good hardware for a really good price. Customized you can get them under $600.

http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkServer-70A4000HUX-i3-4130-Computer/dp/B00F6EK9J2

2 Spice ups