A few of you may have heard the mutterings on Twitter that I was hunting around for some new gear. At first I was going to go down the path that Kendrick Coleman took and build out a white box lab (See his green machines post here). However, as I got into the weeds of ordering and comparing parts on NewEgg, I found that the Dell T110 is both reasonably priced and on the VMware vSphere HCL.
The Manifest
Dell T110:
Core i5
8GB Ram
250GB Disk
URL: http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=bedwlr1&c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&model_id=poweredge-t110
Iomega ix4-200d 4TB
URL: http://www.frys.com/product/6576293?site=sr:SEARCH:MAIN_RSLT_PG
The Gear
They’re not much to look at, but here they are: 
Not pictured is an Iomega ix4-200d 4TB that provides the storage back-end and a 24port 1gbit dumb switch for connectivity.
Screenshot of Ultimate Cluster Power:
Other Notes
This setup runs vSphere like a boss, at least compared to my old setup. As large as the boxes are, they’re actually quite quiet. The switch on the other hand, is a noisy mother. If I include the ix4 into the cost, it brings me to about 1600 for a decent vSphere home lab that is on the HCL and supports a lot of really cool features.
Nice job Cody. I’m looking at the T110 for a home lab also along with several different storage platforms (I can’t decide yet).
One thing I think people tend to leave out of the cost is a Microsoft Technet subscription. Unless you plan on running only Linux VMs you can’t get far without that subscription. I think it’s something like $300-350 for a one year subscription.
One question on your setup – did you add any gigabit NICs to each T110? I believe it comes with just one on-board NIC so I was wondering how many NICs you added and which models.
Thanks Cody, I’m looking forward to hearing more from you as you put your lab through some testing.
Matt
Nice job Cody. I’m looking at the T110 for a home lab also along with several different storage platforms (I can’t decide yet).
One thing I think people tend to leave out of the cost is a Microsoft Technet subscription. Unless you plan on running only Linux VMs you can’t get far without that subscription. I think it’s something like $300-350 for a one year subscription.
One question on your setup – did you add any gigabit NICs to each T110? I believe it comes with just one on-board NIC so I was wondering how many NICs you added and which models.
Thanks Cody, I’m looking forward to hearing more from you as you put your lab through some testing.
Matt
You might want to take a look at the Netgear GS108 dumb switch, fewer ports (8) but it has two great features, no fan so no noise and supports jumbo frames.
http://www.netgear.com/service-provider/products/switches/unmanaged-desktop-switches/GS108.aspx
Only the single Gig port for now. There were two factors in that decision: 1) My home use case, separation is best practice, but when weighed against the cost, I don’t need that level of redundancy/separation, etc at home. 2) The dumb Gig switch, this also limits how much I’d be able to do in this type of setup. I may get into some fancy networking use cases down the road with Vyatta and vSwitches, but for now, it’s not needed.
Agreed re: TechNet subscription.
I also heard that Netgear GS108 has the largest frame buffer cache than any other routers out there