Heath

As I prepare to change jobs one of the things I will miss about my current employer is the LAB (capitalized because a lab this awesome deserves it). Nexus 7k, 6k, 5k, two UCS fabric, UCS blades, and UCS C460s all backed by a VNX plus whatever storage they are beta testing for EMC.







I'll probably never be able to replicate the level of lab I had access to outside of VCE or Cisco, but I need some type of home lab to continue my work with VCAC, LogInsight, NSX and to continue preparing for my VCDX defense. Two 16GB MAC minis with a synology would make a nice, quiet, cool, power efficient homelab with high wife acceptance. Unfortunately I need more RAM than that, and the cost can get quite high.





I looked into Intel NUCs and white boxes, but the best value for me turned out to be older Dell "cloud systems" boxes that are wholesaled on eBay. These boxes are a 2U chassis designed to house four individual servers allowing shared web-hosting companies to drive server density. They don't have the intelligence, IO flexibility and blade removal capability of a real blade chassis and are simply designed to provide cheap density.







There are two main flavors of these boxes, the C6100 which is Intel powered and the dsc6005 / C6105 that is powered by the AMD 6 Core Opteron 2419 EE . The Intel powered option has gone up in price, but there are currently a flood of the AMD powered boxes selling on Ebay for good prices. For $479 I got a chassis with three dual socket servers with each server having two Six-Core Opterons and 32GB of RAM. There are 12 3.5in drive bays on the front, and each server is wired to four drive bays.















Dive into the detailed build out after the break.









The box shows up one day and I excitedly open it up and plug the server in. Holy crap is this thing LOUD. At start up it screams like a jet at takeoff, and once they fans idle down a bit it just sounds like a jet on the tarmac. It has four 80x80x38mm fans behind the drive bays, and they are screamers rated at 140cfm at high static pressure and 70db. The idle speed on these things seems to be 5k RPM and the max is 9k. The box shows up one day and I excitedly open it up and plug the server in. Holy crap is this thing LOUD. At start up it screams like a jet at takeoff, and once they fans idle down a bit it just sounds like a jet on the tarmac. It has four 80x80x38mm fans behind the drive bays, and they are screamers rated at 140cfm at high static pressure and 70db. The idle speed on these things seems to be 5k RPM and the max is 9k.



