Dell C6100 XS23-TY3 Plans - What are you using yours for?

[Patrick]

So thus far I have 3x Dell C6100 XS23-TY3 units installed at Fiberhub, the colocation facility. One is sitting in the rack and may have another incoming for the STH lab.

Wanted to get a sense what everyone is using these things for.

For me the applications are:

• Proxmox VE cluster w/ pfsense front ends for STH hosting
• Cloud platform lab for STH

Wanted to see what others are using these things for.

 

[Jeggs101]

If I get one will be doing a miscellaneous lab to prove out before I get real hardware for it.

 

[PigLover]

Virtualization for running my home services (telephones, IP cameras, MythTV, web and mail server, etc) and a testbed for playing with virtualization concepts (HA, live migration, service orchestration, etc). Need to learn more - its important for lots of reasons. Basically a playground.

I've considered running one node as an 8-drive ZFS server as a backup/adjunct to my existing one. I already have a 40TB ZFS server but with the teardown of one of my workstations I've lost my "two copies of the important stuff" backup regime. Unfortunately this would require a somewhat ghetto cabling configuration and replacing one of the cheap Mellanox 10Gbe cards I just received today with a $400 mezzanine card. I've already got a suitable chassis - not ideal, but suitable - and I'm pretty sure i can equip it for less money and less hassle.

 

[dba]

I have a Windows 2012 Hyper-V cluster up and running using one C6100 - and it's incredibly nice. I'm going to use the others for experiments - private cloud, Hadoop/Pig, and shared-nothing DB trials.

 

[RimBlock]

I am looking at getting a couple over, if I can get the seller to finalise.

One will be to replace my current virtualization server and to enable playing with multiserver features, failovers, multi-DB server replication (Master -> slave and master /master), load balancing solutions.

The other will just be a sand box but will probably be looking to put some basic scripts together on 3 of he nodes to simulate the fourth being in a m,ultiuser environment for load testing and basic benchmarking (probably just sql calls and web page loads). I will most likely look to sell on if possible so it will also be used for testing the local market.

RB

 

[Patrick]

I can imagine that these would do well outside the US market.

 

[autowidget]

I've already started playing with OpenStack and will probably check out CloudStack and Proxmox VE as well at some point. The nice thing about having the IPMI is being able to test bare metal provisioning. The main things I want to be able to do is brush up on provisioning, both physical and virtual, and configuration management. I'll eventually move all of my current VM infrastructure onto the C6100 and have some remaining capacity to keep a testbed to play with.

 

[RimBlock]

I can imagine that these would do well outside the US market.

You would have thought so but the market over here seems to work a little different to what the Uk and, I presume, the US markets do.

RB

 

[RimBlock]

Ok, have narrowed down my options.

I will be using it as 3 ESXi servers (vSphere Foundation license) with the 4th being a ZFS san using a LSI 9202-16e and connecting to the nodes via a Infiniband daughter card (the other 3 will have DDR PCIe cards).

I will use my Norco chassis (without backplanes) as a DAS.

This will allow me to sell my Intel S1200BTL based ESXi server and most of my SAN including the P812.

RB