Recent content by nickwalt

I'm one of the many people who have built a quiet server out of used components from Chinese data centers. The great thing about these components is that they came from controlled environments with regulated temperature, conditioned power, free of moisture and dust - and the components have...

Hi everyone, I have a baremetal install of ESXi 8 and would like to use NSX 4.1 to create a multi-tenancy environment for un-nested VMs running directly on the baremetal host. Is this just a matter of installing the NSX Manager in a 3-way VM cluster and configuring the Gateways? In the back of...

Just received the two new 64GB 2933 MHz memory modules from Tugm after moving slowly across the planet during the Christmas and New Year break. Well packaged as always and identical part numbers to the four modules already sent from Tugm: Look at all that beautiful memory: Thanks, Tugm!

Hi Tugm, thank you. I was wondering if there was an issue with eBay, too. I don't have much experience with it so didn't know what to expect. Their chat tech is rudimentary at best. I didn't know you were a member of STH but should have checked and sent you a private message. In future I can...

Hi Everyone, Tugm4470 issued me a FedEx Waybill and Commercial Invoice for the return of 4 x 32GB 3200 RDIMM memory, to be exchanged for 2 x 64GB 2933 RDIMM memory. I then purchased 4 x 64GB 2933 RDIMM memory and when they arrived I swapped out the 4 x 32GB modules and returned them using his...

That particular data center didn't have cold or hot isle containment and sealing every gap was not standard practice. However, ensuring front-to-rear airflow was enforced and luckily most of our access switches exhausted through the switchports. Interestingly, the Juniper and Cisco switches were...

That is a pretty funny comment because anyone installing a rack of regular Front-of-Rack to Rear-of-Rack (cold isle to hot isle) servers will look at F-to-R as a data center standard for edge infrastructure. For example:

Thanks for the model recommendations. Maybe there are so many good eBay stores selling network equipment that it is difficult to make a recommendation.

Thanks, I think I've been looking at too many 100G LR4 QSFP28 transceivers. A single small switch for a homelab. Four switchports might be enough but 8-12 is good too.

I've been using tugm4470 to purchase excellent quality used data center equipment, such as Epyc CPUs and motherboards, memory and SSDs. However, he does not sell switches and so was wondering if many people here have good experience with sellers who stock switches. My preference would be branch...

Yeah. SR-IOV - being an older technology and not specific to storage and NVME does seem to be redundant. It could be that these drives are made to provide flexible support for customers who might juggle them across different product installations. NVME and it's integration into modern CPU and...

Coming back to nested installations of ESXi running vCentre 8, NSX 4.1 and vSan 8 I will test out with the standard vm volume then consider used data centre SSDs with NVME namespaces that can be passed through to the ESXi vSan ESA VMs.

Yeah, it is a problem. However, the price jump to 128GB modules is high. 512GB memory is good for a 32 core Epyc. Depending on how complex the Cisco labs get I may end up with a Supermicro H11SSL-i (PCIE 3.0) or Tyan S8030GM2NE (PCIE 4.0) motherboard, Epyc Rome, and 256GB DDR4 2666MHz modules...

Just upgraded the Epyc server by replacing the 4 x 32GB modules with 4 x 64GB modules, with another 2 x 64GB modules being added in a couple of weeks to take it to 384GB. After that I'll add another 2 x 64GB to max out the eight slots to 512GB DDR4 2933.

I ended up purchasing 4 x 64GB 2933MHz DDR4 RDIMM modules to go with the Epyc 7452 (32 cores). I will return the 4 x 32GB 3200MHz DDR4 RDIMM modules and use the credit to purchase another 2 x 64GB 2933MHz modules. Will then later finalise the upgrade with another 2 x 64GB 2933MHz modules, which...