Hey all, I'm a network engineer by trade and have played with ESXi in the past. I have a HP ProLiant N40L that I don't often turn on anymore because it really isn't enough machine to do much, luckily it wasn't a huge investment either.
This is my first post here, hopefully this is an OK sub-forum for this topic.
I recently started looking at Cisco VIRL which is a virtual environment for Cisco's networking OS's, and it supports some of them that GNS3 can't (Nexus, and ASA devices). So here I am looking at server options again for the first time in a few years.
After some brief searching, the Supermicro SYS-E300-8D caught my eye (Tenet's E300-8D thread brought me here). I have a 13U rack which is now mostly empty due to selling off Cisco lab hardware, so I'm leaning towards a rack-mountable server.
Hoping to hear some possible suggestions for the following requirements, basically in this order of importance:
1. Quiet, I need to run this in my apartment, and it will be in or near the living room. It can be above a whisper of course, but this is the reason I'm not buying a used Dell off of eBay or something.
2. Powerful enough to run ESXi and VIRL (bare-metal) without being disappointed by performance. I'll boot into either as needed. I'm thinking at any given time if I was booting into ESXi to play, I'd want to be able to spin up at least 4 VMs - don't need fancy graphics, these would probably be a mixture of WIN/*NIX.
3. Cost / Power consumption - I'm willing to throw some money at something if it's meeting the above requirements. I'm also hoping not to spend more than $2,000, at least not immediately. The cost is less important than having a sufficiently quiet/powerful virtual lab.
Whatever option I go with it will be an Intel CPU. The Supermicro SYS-E300-8D may be the right choice, but I'm not sure how quiet I can get it. I don't have a fear of swapping out parts in servers, or in other words whatever solution I come up with doesn't need to be a perfect one right out of the box.
By all means ask me more questions about needs or make recommendations. Links to other posts, here, elsewhere, blogs, etc are all appreciated.
This is my first post here, hopefully this is an OK sub-forum for this topic.
I recently started looking at Cisco VIRL which is a virtual environment for Cisco's networking OS's, and it supports some of them that GNS3 can't (Nexus, and ASA devices). So here I am looking at server options again for the first time in a few years.
After some brief searching, the Supermicro SYS-E300-8D caught my eye (Tenet's E300-8D thread brought me here). I have a 13U rack which is now mostly empty due to selling off Cisco lab hardware, so I'm leaning towards a rack-mountable server.
Hoping to hear some possible suggestions for the following requirements, basically in this order of importance:
1. Quiet, I need to run this in my apartment, and it will be in or near the living room. It can be above a whisper of course, but this is the reason I'm not buying a used Dell off of eBay or something.
2. Powerful enough to run ESXi and VIRL (bare-metal) without being disappointed by performance. I'll boot into either as needed. I'm thinking at any given time if I was booting into ESXi to play, I'd want to be able to spin up at least 4 VMs - don't need fancy graphics, these would probably be a mixture of WIN/*NIX.
3. Cost / Power consumption - I'm willing to throw some money at something if it's meeting the above requirements. I'm also hoping not to spend more than $2,000, at least not immediately. The cost is less important than having a sufficiently quiet/powerful virtual lab.
Whatever option I go with it will be an Intel CPU. The Supermicro SYS-E300-8D may be the right choice, but I'm not sure how quiet I can get it. I don't have a fear of swapping out parts in servers, or in other words whatever solution I come up with doesn't need to be a perfect one right out of the box.
By all means ask me more questions about needs or make recommendations. Links to other posts, here, elsewhere, blogs, etc are all appreciated.
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