Skip to main content

Dell's R210-II as vSphere home lab server

My VI3 and vSphere4 home lab consisted of whitebox PCs. For VI3 I used MSI based nonames, for vSphere4 I used Shuttle SX58j3. For the new vSphere5 generation, I wanted some real server hardware. Because of shallow depth requirements, the choice of rackmount servers was limited. I picked the Dell Poweredge R210II instead of the sx58j3 because
- on the vSphere HCL (the sx58j3's won't boot vSphere5 RC !)
- Sandy Bridge low TDP CPUs available (I got the E3-1270)
- onboard dual BCM5716 nics support iSCSI offload (aka "dependent HW iSCSI")
- IPMI built-in (not tested yet)
- dense: 1U (the sx58j3 is about 4 units, but can fit 2 in 19")
- one free PCIe slot (The sx58j3 has 2 slots, but needs a VGA card)
- not incredibly expensive (up to 16GB RAM)
Downsides:
- only one free PCIe slot (max GbE nics needs expensive quadport card)
- incredibly expensive (with 32GB RAM it's 3x the price of a 16GB config)
- can't buy without at least one disk. I'll be running from USB sticks.

Comments

Brian said…
Hi! I found your post about using ESXi on a R210-II. Did you get this to work? I tried loading it this morning and it seems to have a hard time recognizing the drive config.
19/10/11 20:28
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Volkswagen UHV bluetooth touch adapter & its problems

My Volkswagen car has the "universal cellphone preparation" UHV built-in. This is the main part of a car kit, but requires an additional adapter for connecting to a cellphone. At first, I was using an adapter for my good old Nokia 6310, even after I changed to the Nokia E71. Connecting was easy: pair the phone with the "VW UHV" bluetooth entity, and done. This has the phone connected to the car kit at all times, so even non-call-related functions use the car audio system (e.g. voice recognition). But progress will have its way, no matter what happens. So in comes the "bluetooth touch adapter". Instead of a phone-specific adapter, this is a small touchscreen device that slots into the UHV dashboard mount. Connecting a phone is very different now: the Bluetooth Touch Adapter connects to the "VW UHV" device via bluetooth the phone connects to "Touch Adapter" device, also via bluetooth The device doesn't allow step 2 if step 1 didn'...
12 comments
Read more

Reset lost root password on vSphere ESXi 6.7

VMware's solution to a lost or forgotten root password for ESXi is simple: go to  https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/1317898?lang=en_US  and you'll find that "Reinstalling the ESXi host is the only supported way to reset a password on ESXi". If your host is still connected to vCenter, you may be able to use Host Profiles to reset the root password, or alternatively you can join ESXi in Active Directory via vCenter, and log in with a user in the "ESX Admins" AD group. If your host is no longer connected to vCenter, those options are closed. Can you avoid reinstallation? Fortunately, you can. You will need to reset and reboot your ESXi though. If you're ready for an unsupported deep dive into the bowels of ESXi, follow these steps: Create a bootable Linux USB-drive (or something else you can boot your server with). I used a CentOS 7 installation USB-drive that I could use to boot into rescue mode. Reset your ESXi and boot from the Linux medium. Ident...
Post a Comment
Read more

GEM WS2 MIDI System Exclusive structure and checksums

MIDI is the standard for communication between electronic music instruments like keyboards and synthesizers. And computers! While tinkering with an old floppy-less GEM WS2 keyboard, I wanted to figure out the structure of their System Exclusive memory dumps. SysEx is the vendor-specific (and non-standard) part of MIDI. Vendors can use it for real-time instructions (changing a sound parameter in real-time) and for non-real-time instructions (sending or loading a configuration, sample set, etc.). In the GEM WS2, there's two ways of saving the memory (voices, globals, styles and songs): in .ALL files on floppy, and via MIDI SysEx. The .ALL files are binary files, 60415 bytes long. The only recognizable parts are the ASCII encoded voice and global names. The SysEx dumps are 73691 bytes long. As always in MIDI, only command start (and end) bytes have MSB 1, and all data bytes have MSB 0. The data is spread out over 576 SysEx packets, preceded by one SysEx packet with header informat...
23 comments
Read more