I was planning to write few posts regarding my cheap lab setup. Thanksgiving holiday got into the way.
My name is Bob, I am 58 and retired in year 2000 from working in IT field for 20years. I am addicted to buying and playing with IT equipment.
I lived near Frys electronic store, that doesn't help with my addiction problem.
I purchased 3 Dell C6100 in May, and few other HP servers as well. Every time someone post in a good deal in section, my money flying out of my wallet.
All I am using for my equipment is to mess around and not for any production use. So max performance is not my highest priorities.
Let me describe my lab iPXE boot setup. I am running Xpenology on 2 HP N40L 5x3TB drives , 3 servers make from AMD FM1 motherboard and A4, or A8 CPU ( Year 2012 black friday specials $25 motherboard and $25 AMD A4 CPU) and 6x3TB drives , 1 Ggiabyte ITX with SSD. BTW, the AMD FM1 systems work great and low power as well.
If you have a real Synology SAN, then you can skip this part. Otherwise take a look at the Xpenology forum.
XPEnology DS3612xs DSM 4.2 build 3211++ (repack v1.2)
I compare the Xpenology vs Miscrosoft iSCSI target vs Starwind free version.
The Xpenology fit into my lab the best.
Pro:
work really well with low end cpu and motherboard (Frys special) that I could pickup for few peanuts.
Web GUI to assign iSCSI LUN to target , faster than using Window copy and paste
Able to assign "friendly name" to iSCSI LUN and Target. i.e. name "WS12R2-Sysprep" to iSCSI LUN1 , or Node1 to a iSCSI target
Clone iSCSI LUN, save disk space and time.
example: 12 Window 2012R2 OS image, do not require 12 x 10gb, only the parent iSCSI LUN is 10gb, the child iSCSI LUN is not a full copy.
That's it for now, more on iPXE tomorrow.