Home lab for development

[sao123]

i want to build and ESXi lab for development.

My goals are to setup 1-2 TFS Server (2012 & 2015), 1-2 Sharepoint Server (2010 & 2013), and a Mint LAMP stack, all of which will probably need a AD/DC Server.

Because SQL server has pretty hefty requirements, I am going to need decent CPU and a lot of RAM.

i am considering the following, but not sure which will be the best.

I could reasonably inexpensively build a I7-4790K (4 cores with HT) with a Z97 Mobo and 32GB ram.
Or I could consider a 5820K (6 cores with HT) with an X99 Board and 64GB of Ram. (Expensive)
Or I could buy a used Dell poweredge r710 Dual X5650/X5670 (EACH 6 cores with HT) with 64Gb of Ram for about 1100.

I like the cheap I7-4790K build because I'd like to be able to repurpose this hardware as a desktop when im done with it....but im scared of the 32GB ram limitation with 3-5 SQL servers in the lab.

Anyone have a home lab, which could offer up some advice?

 

[Ken g6]

Skylake is coming soon. And I'm not completely sure, but I think it will support at least 64GB DDR4 RAM.

 

[mfenn]

SQL Servers only need a lot of RAM to perform well if they're being heavily loaded. Certainly the CPU load will be minimal on average. In a lab environment, you can get by with a lot less that you would need for production.

If you have a place to put a rackmount server, buying a used ~5-year-old one like the R710 is probably your best bang for the buck. Otherwise, you might be surprised by what you can get out of a 32GB LGA1150 box.

 

[sao123]

Skylake is coming soon. And I'm not completely sure, but I think it will support at least 64GB DDR4 RAM.

im going to look into skylake, but I wonder how soon ESXi 6 will support most of the hardware, and consumer skylake doesn't appear to have 6 core cpus to launch anytime soon.

 

[sourceninja]

...

 

[dave_the_nerd]

If you are concerned about noise or intend to re-use it as a desktop workstation, you can get a used pedestal server that will probably offer similar specs to the R710, but be in a quieter tower case. (Although many of the less expensive ones are only single-CPU ones.)

There are a lot of Lenovo Thinkservers available on eBay - most of them would need RAM upgrades to work for your use case, but you'd be coming in well under $1k. (As mentioned before, CPU isn't all that important and you probably need less RAM than you think.)

If you wanted to go nuts, used Xeon CPUs aren't usually that terribly expensive, and would make decent upgrade.

FWIW, the server in my sig runs ESX just fine. (If you were interested in BYO, SuperMicro motherboards would be an okay place to start.)

 

[sao123]

If you are concerned about noise or intend to re-use it as a desktop workstation, you can get a used pedestal server that will probably offer similar specs to the R710, but be in a quieter tower case. (Although many of the less expensive ones are only single-CPU ones.)

There are a lot of Lenovo Thinkservers available on eBay - most of them would need RAM upgrades to work for your use case, but you'd be coming in well under $1k. (As mentioned before, CPU isn't all that important and you probably need less RAM than you think.)

If you wanted to go nuts, used Xeon CPUs aren't usually that terribly expensive, and would make decent upgrade.

FWIW, the server in my sig runs ESX just fine. (If you were interested in BYO, SuperMicro motherboards would be an okay place to start.)

How many servers can you comfortably run with 16G ram? I'm hesitant to build with 32GB...

in my ESXi proof of concept test build... I currently have, 1 vm server -> win 2008R2 with SQL 2014 std, SharePoint 2013 and TFS 2013 running on an OC'd Q9550 / ASUS P5Q-e with 8GB DDR2 ram and it is unbearably slow.

If CPU is not the limiting factor, it must be the RAM.

 

[XavierMace]

Your price is WAY high on that R710. I also personally prefer HP's to Dell.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-ProLiant...Hz-64GB-RPS-/201397969698?hash=item2ee4412322

$550 shipped. I'd spend an extra $100 to get a pair of L5640's then call it good. I've got 3 of those at my house, run like champs. That's going to be more than enough for what you're doing, assuming you've got a suitably fast disk system.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

How many servers can you comfortably run with 16G ram? I'm hesitant to build with 32GB...

I'm not saying you don't need 32GB of RAM - I honestly don't know. Needs depend on the applications you're running. I'm merely pointing out that the SuperMicro board I have, all the NICs and stuff were recognized and supported by a vanilla ESX 5.5 ISO.

"How many servers" depends what you're doing. I actually do have a few VMs hosted by that server, but they're small (2GB for PLEX, 3GB for Minecraft, 1GB for the Crashplan slave, and 256MB each for the local DNS server and my twitter chatbot, which is a work in progress.) It's lightweight stuff, works fine.

in my ESXi proof of concept test build... I currently have, 1 vm server -> win 2008R2 with SQL 2014 std, SharePoint 2013 and TFS 2013 running on an OC'd Q9550 / ASUS P5Q-e with 8GB DDR2 ram and it is unbearably slow.

If CPU is not the limiting factor, it must be the RAM.

Or the storage subsystem. That's usually the limitation for DBs, actually. What kind of storage do you have on that box? What does Resource Monitor show for disk queue depth, etc.?

Counterpoint to all this: if you're developing applications, you'll want to observe how the DB performance is when it hit disks anyway (vs. operating completely in RAM.)

 

[sao123]

Your price is WAY high on that R710. I also personally prefer HP's to Dell.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/HP-ProLiant...Hz-64GB-RPS-/201397969698?hash=item2ee4412322

$550 shipped. I'd spend an extra $100 to get a pair of L5640's then call it good. I've got 3 of those at my house, run like champs. That's going to be more than enough for what you're doing, assuming you've got a suitably fast disk system.

at first glance it might seem like its expensive... but that also include all 6 caddies. 6x 300GB 15K SAS drives, PREC 6i Raid, and rails.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-POWERE...702?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item4179329296


actually I just found this one for $689 but ill have to put drives in it.
http://www.ebay.com/itm/DELL-POWERE...856?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item58c6cae1a8

 

[XavierMace]

The PERC 6i is the onboard controller. They all have one. The HP's have a P410i.

So, the question is if 6x300Gb drives is worth almost $600 to you. I'd spend that on a few SSD's instead, personally.

Here's one for $530: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerE...PSU-DVD-ROM-/231637834962?hash=item35eeb0dcd2

 

[sao123]

The PERC 6i is the onboard controller. They all have one. The HP's have a P410i.

So, the question is if 6x300Gb drives is worth almost $600 to you. I'd spend that on a few SSD's instead, personally.

Here's one for $530: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-PowerE...PSU-DVD-ROM-/231637834962?hash=item35eeb0dcd2

no 6x300GB drives isn't $600... but you also forget
a generation newer CPU. (Nehalem vs westmere)
$155 Dual Hex Cores vs Dual Quad Cores.
$30 Front Bezel
$50 6 trays
$100 Rails

 

[XavierMace]

No, I didn't. I'm looking at at actual useful value.

If you're not racking it, the rails and bezel do absolutely nothing for you.

The performance difference between the two processors is going to be next to nothing.

I'll give you the trays. But my point is for what you're using it for you can get one that will do everything you need for half the price you were posting.

 

[sao123]

well I might have a steal of a deal... if it works out.
Found a guy selling locally a 5930K on a asus x99 board with a gtx970 with 16Gb (4x4) ram a boot SSD 1TB data drive, for $800. So i'll buy 64GB of ram in a 4x8 configuration, and have a pretty decent ESXI whitebox.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

well I might have a steal of a deal... if it works out.
Found a guy selling locally a 5930K on a asus x99 board with a gtx970 with 16Gb (4x4) ram a boot SSD 1TB data drive, for $800. So i'll buy 64GB of ram in a 4x8 configuration, and have a pretty decent ESXI whitebox.

Wow. Who did he steal it from?

Small, unmarked bills.

Upshot is, you can stick the 970 and the old RAM on eBay and make some money back.

 

[sao123]

Wow. Who did he steal it from?

Small, unmarked bills.

Upshot is, you can stick the 970 and the old RAM on eBay and make some money back.

ebay sucks... ill probably eventually unload it here.

 

[KentState]

I ran 4 SQL Servers, 2 AD/DC, 2 web, 1 sharepoint, 1 Exchange, 1 Windows 7 desktop and probably missing something on a 3770k w 32GB ram using an SSD a local cache. The NFS shares for the VM's where located on a Synology 1511 NAS. This was all a lab of course, but everything played well together and didn't present any issues unless I purposely set out to kill performance. The VM's did take a longer amount of time to load up over a network, but that was only real issue.

 

[ultimatebob]

If you really want to learn VMWare vSphere while you're installing ESXi, you might want to get two physical servers so you can practice features like HA and DRS configuration.

You can get older servers like used PowerEdge servers like T420's for dirt cheap on eBay now.

 

[sao123]

I ran 4 SQL Servers, 2 AD/DC, 2 web, 1 sharepoint, 1 Exchange, 1 Windows 7 desktop and probably missing something on a 3770k w 32GB ram using an SSD a local cache. The NFS shares for the VM's where located on a Synology 1511 NAS. This was all a lab of course, but everything played well together and didn't present any issues unless I purposely set out to kill performance. The VM's did take a longer amount of time to load up over a network, but that was only real issue.

How big of an SSD did you need for that cache? How much ram did you allocate to each server? How much storage on the nas did the whole lab take up? Considering the synology solution, but didn't know how it would perform.