VM / Hyper V lab - Help please

[X5211]

Looking to buy a high spec desktop pc or server to use solely as a VM/hyper V home lab... First it would be used for Hyper-V as more familiar with that and will be running 4 or 5 VM's for SCCM, clients etc, and then at a later date intend to use it for Vmware..

Budget is around £500 but can find more if needed.. So I was thinking a minimum of 64gb RAM and then open to suggestions on what it should/shouldn't have, what components should i spend the money on.. What are possible bottlenecks to avoid?

Any thoughts on the machine below?

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-Desktop-Gaming-Towe...

Blowing the budget - but would it be a much better option?
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Dell-Precision-T5500-2x-...

[nyt]

I'd go for the first box .. lots of memory is useful when running VMs.
Having said that even the lower memory of the second machine should be adequate.

Remember that these machines are likely to make a lot of fan noise (if you share a room with them) and use a lot of power (if you're paying for it).

[sjg]

Old CPUs so power hungry but a lot of RAM for the money.

I got a Dell T3610 from their outlet for £550, which is newer (and very quiet, even under load) but I did have to buy the RAM at about £110 per 16GB.

[UpTheIron]

First box is running a pretty old CPU... I'd be looking for something that is a barebones equivalent of the second one - no need for the graphics card for instance.

My main "lab" at the moment is an old ML370 G6 with dual E5530's and 96GB of RAM. It's good for a bundle of VM's. What do you plan to do for storage?

As per the other poster - consider the noise if it will be an issue - mine lives in the garage.

Also if you are likely to leave it on 24/7 you will be better off going for much newer and lower power kit otherwise the power bills will rack up.

[X5211]

I have a spare room it can sit in and will be paying for the power bills..

Storage - No idea really.. What do i need to know? 1 disk/2 disk type size? Does it matter if initially only for Hyper-V and can spend some more money if I want to move into Vmware?

[sjg]

SSD is cheap enough these days that all my VMs live on that. Once you have enough RAM, storage is the main bottleneck. CPU actually isn't that important. A whitebox with an i5 and 32GB works nicely - the trouble is that going past 32GB means jumping to Xeon and server/workstation class stuff and (new at least) that gets really pricey.

Depending on your needs you may get away with less RAM. Dynamic memory means that unless you're hammering your lab VMs it may use far less than you're allocating.

[mikef]

Really? 4-5 concurrent VMs on an i5?

That Dell box looks basic but OK

As a left-field alternative, unless you're really keen on Hyper-V, my VM farm runs on a 2010 Mac Pro Dual Xeon that I picked up off eBay for a grand. Had to buy Parallels though. The integration with OS-X Yosemite is superb.

[TonyRPH]

Up until recently, I was running 4 VMs on an AMD Phenom II with 8Gb RAM.

They ran fine for general home use.

At work, I'm running 8 - 10 VMs on some hosts (Dell R720 - Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 0 @ 2.00GHz) with 48Gb RAM, and the only time they struggle a bit is when I run windows updates on them all simultaneously (a lot of that is due to disk io - I don't have remote storage). All have local SAS storage.

These are currently running ESXi but were previously running HyperV in the same config.

There is a combination of Server 2012 and Linux boxes - one host is running an Exchange VM the other is running a MSSQL VM.

Unless you are planning on running a huge amount of VMs, you don't need a massive spec for home use.

My current home box is an Intel i3 with 16Gb RAM - more than adequate for my needs.

I would look for an i3 / i5 box with 32Gb ram at your budget.

I reckon you'd be fine with some decent SATA disks too, but if you want to spend your money on SSDs...

Oh, and the 'i' series CPUs have a much lower TDP than the Xeons.

Edited by TonyRPH on Sunday 29th March 11:29

[X5211]

Anyone got a rough idea how much more it will cost to one of the older machines in the links above vs running a new more power efficient server.

Or does anyone have any links to alternative servers ready to buy? I know what will happen is If i spend too much time getting up to speed on hardware I wont ever get around to buying anything..

Can anyone help prioritise..

Amount CPU cores
Fast disk
Memory
Anything else?

[TonyRPH]

From CPU Benchmark.net

The CPU in the Dell T5500 (X5650) Ave CPU mark 7601 / TDP 95w

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon...

Dell Precision 690 (E5345) ave. CPU mark 2917 / TDP 80w

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon...

Intel i3 ave. CPU mark 4796 / TDP 54w

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core...

The Dell is a clear winner in performance.

I suspect you may well be able to build your own i3 / i5 system for less than (or equal to) the cost of the Dell T550 however.

Unless you are building something to run anything other than a home test environment, it's highly unlikely you'll need anything better than any of the above.

If you plan on migrating to ESXi in the future, you will however need a supported RAID controller, whereas Windows will work with most on board 'host raid' controllers given suitable drivers. Or you could use the RAID built in to Windows as well.

Edited by TonyRPH on Sunday 29th March 11:42

[X5211]

Any on here look good value? - http://stores.ebay.co.uk/bargain-hardware-store/VM...

[Kapenta]

http://www.serversplus.com/servers/server_bundles/...

How about a couple of these? Three of them with three SSD's and a few spindles and you can build a VSAN...

[X5211]

Kapenta said:

http://www.serversplus.com/servers/server_bundles/...

How about a couple of these? Three of them with three SSD's and a few spindles and you can build a VSAN...

Nice idea but would completely blow the budget..

[Kapenta]

X5211 said:

Nice idea but would completely blow the budget..

Look for G7 Microservers on EBay. You could probably pick a couple up, correct spec for your budget?

[TonyRPH]

OP, do you have any experience with these 1U rack mount servers?

You know how much heat they generate?

How noisy they can be?

We ran 3 HP DL380s in our home 'comms room' (a dedicated room in the garage) for a couple of months, and keeping them cool over summer was a major issue without air conditioning.

Never mind the power consumption...

[X5211]

TonyRPH said:

OP, do you have any experience with these 1U rack mount servers?

You know how much heat they generate?

How noisy they can be?

We ran 3 HP DL380s in our home 'comms room' (a dedicated room in the garage) for a couple of months, and keeping them cool over summer was a major issue without air conditioning.

Never mind the power consumption...

I do and also have a dl380 sitting here doing nothing for that very reason. :-)

[TonyRPH]

Fair enough!

Our DL380s are long gone now.

[lestag]

X5211 said:

Can anyone help prioritise..

Amount CPU cores
Fast disk
Memory
Anything else?

3)Amount CPU cores
2)Fast disk
1)Memory

In your case you will want SQL server and SCCM so memory
I'm running an i7 laptop with 35MB SSD and 16GB ram using VMware workstation, its good for half a dozen servers, but exchange and sql will have a tendency to make things grind

[theboss]

X5211 said:

Anyone got a rough idea how much more it will cost to one of the older machines in the links above vs running a new more power efficient server.

Or does anyone have any links to alternative servers ready to buy? I know what will happen is If i spend too much time getting up to speed on hardware I wont ever get around to buying anything..

Can anyone help prioritise..

Amount CPU cores
Fast disk
Memory
Anything else?

Fast disk and memory are definitely your most important factors - both will determine how many VMs you can run. When idle you'd be surprised how much you can overcommit cores but the same can't be said of RAM or disk (and by disk I mean I/O rather than capacity).

I wouldn't place any VM on non-SSD storage personally - a single decent SSD is now cheap and large enough to be able to store dozens of VMs whilst servicing their aggregate random I/O at a rate which would equate to many dozens of conventional disks in RAID.

[X5211]

TonyRPH said:

OP, do you have any experience with these 1U rack mount servers?

You know how much heat they generate?

How noisy they can be?

We ran 3 HP DL380s in our home 'comms room' (a dedicated room in the garage) for a couple of months, and keeping them cool over summer was a major issue without air conditioning.

Never mind the power consumption...

I do and also have a dl380 sitting here doing nothing for that very reason. :-)