Why a HP servers?
Thats a very good question. There are very good Blog posts about Mc Mini Based homeless, or other DIY based servers. But the with the Mc Minis i get not enough memory, and with the DIY system im not cheeper then with a refurbished HP DL380 G8.
But why do i not use a DL 380 G7 or G6 who are much cheeper then the G8. It’s quit simple, starting with vSphere 6.5 the hypervisor requires full CPU hardware virtualisation support. And the even the majority of CPU’s for the G7 Systems do not fulfil that requirement. So to be on the safe side i have chosen a DL 380 G8 servers as my home-lab platform.
Where to get the server
I started my search for a refurbished server deal in Germany and was not that happy with the prices. Then i extend my search to all over Europe and found the UK based https://www.bargainhardware.co.uk. They have a full build to order shop for refurbished servers in all sizes. With very good prices, and only £ 30,- for EU delivery.
The Server
- DL 380e G8 Chassis with 24 SFF slots
- 2x Intel Xeon E5-2630L V2 – 6-Core 2.40Ghz (15MB Cache, 7.20GTs, 60W)
- 8x 16GB – DDR3L 1333MHz
- 10/40 Gbit Mellanox FLOM (modular onboard networkcard)
- 1GbE (Dual Port) RJ45 NIC
- 2x HP Hot-Swap PSU 750W Platinum
- 2x PCI-e raiser cards
So the server has enought space to scale, 16 empty MEM slots and 24 SFF slots for disks. And I think the dual 40 Gbit host cross link should be able to handle ANYTHING i do in my home lab.
The VSAN hardware
The plan was do use consumer SSD’s like the SanDisk SSD Plus 1TB as the capacity drives, and some PCI-e SSD for the frontend cache. But to my surprise I found on eBay used Fusion-IO drives with a prize point of about € 130/TB including delivery from US and EU taxes. So i decided to build my whole VSAN with Fusion-IO drives.
So my VSAN is now build per Server with one 768 GB Fusion-IO as frontend Cache, and two 1,6 TB Fusion-IO cards as capacity drives. And with a dual 40 Gbit cross link between the two hosts.
The rest of the hardware
For the VSAN Quorum server I will use one of my current “old” desktops server (4 cores, 32 GB MEM), because this is powerfull enough. And should keep up even with massiv numbers of VSAN operation like create, snapshot ….
The TOR switch is one of my old HP ProCurve 2824 switches, but will get replaced later this year with a new Ubiquite Networks – UniFi Switch 24 to streamline my home network.
Whats next
The next posts in this series will cover some details of the installation and also performance tests.
So stay tuned.