{"id":294,"date":"2008-11-17T19:12:40","date_gmt":"2008-11-17T19:12:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andrius.kozeniauskas.com\/blog\/?p=294"},"modified":"2008-11-17T19:12:40","modified_gmt":"2008-11-17T19:12:40","slug":"building-cheap-virtual-test-environment-part1-choosing-hardware","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.kozeniauskas.com\/itblog\/2008\/11\/17\/building-cheap-virtual-test-environment-part1-choosing-hardware\/","title":{"rendered":"Building Cheap Virtual Test Environment PART1: Choosing hardware"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve deicided that it is time for me to build my own testing environment at home. I&#8217;ve been playing around with Vmware server and MS Virtual server for a while and they work OK to some extent. With Vmware I had 2 VM running with server os, but the speed of the whole system was quite slow as the hard drive LED was constantly on. To make thing better I&#8217;ve bought external USB drive and was creating VMs on it and that improved performance a lot, but then if I tried to create a VM with DB on it then things were getting slow again.<br \/>\nSo after VMware made ESXi free I was thinking of getting my own server that I could use as a virtual testing lab \ud83d\ude42<!--more--><br \/>\nI was not willing to splash thousands of Euro fot the system so initially I wanted to build my system myself out of separate components. But after spending some time googling arround and reading about ESXi I&#8217;ve found that ESXi has limited hardware support and that is why I&#8217;ve decided to go for HP ML110 G5 or ML115 G5 server.<br \/>\nThe next step was to find who is selling them in Ireland. The cheapest I could get was arround 400 Euro for ML110 G5 with 250GB SATA drive and 512MB of RAM. Well this is no exactly the best config for Virtual Environment.<br \/>\nAfter cheking Ebay I&#8217;ve found that I can get the same server with more RAM and shipping for 300Euro so I went for it. The box arrived 2 day later.<br \/>\nThe first thin I needed is to beef it up so I&#8217;ve ordered 8GB of RAM(this is the max it can take) and two 500GB SATA drives. This costed me another 230Euro with shipping. The RAM I&#8217;ve ordered was not ECC but it works fine I had to remove the original 1GB of RAM that came with server as it would not work with the new one.<\/p>\n<p>So the whole system costed me 530Euro pretty good isn&#8217;t it?<br \/>\nHere is the config:<\/p>\n<ul class=\"bodycopy\">\n<li><span class=\"subheads\">Processor<\/span><span class=\"bodycopy\">: <\/span>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"bodycopy\">Dual-Core Intel\u00ae Xeon\u00ae processors 3065<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li class=\"bodycopy\"><span class=\"subheads\">Memory<\/span>:\n<ul>\n<li class=\"bodycopy\">8 GB PC6400 DDR2<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li class=\"bodycopy\"><span class=\"subheads\">Storage Controller<\/span>:\n<ul>\n<li class=\"bodycopy\">SATA Models: Integrated 6 ports SATA controller              with embedded RAID (4 ports available for Hard Disks)<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li class=\"bodycopy\"><span class=\"subheads\">Internal Drives <\/span>\n<ul>\n<li><span class=\"bodycopy\"> <\/span>\n<ul>\n<li class=\"bodycopy\">1x250GB SATA drive<\/li>\n<li class=\"bodycopy\">2x500GB SATA drives<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li class=\"bodycopy\"><span class=\"subheads\">Network Controller<\/span>:\n<ul>\n<li class=\"bodycopy\">Embedded NC105i PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Server              Adapter<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve deicided that it is time for me to build my own testing environment at home. I&#8217;ve been playing around with Vmware server and MS Virtual server for a while and they work OK to some extent. With Vmware I had 2 VM running with server os, but the speed of the whole system was [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9],"tags":[58,162],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kozeniauskas.com\/itblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kozeniauskas.com\/itblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kozeniauskas.com\/itblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kozeniauskas.com\/itblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kozeniauskas.com\/itblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.kozeniauskas.com\/itblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.kozeniauskas.com\/itblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kozeniauskas.com\/itblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.kozeniauskas.com\/itblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}