I recently went through the process of consolidating a bunch of servers at home, primarily driven by the need to avoid juggling VMs across multiple machines to get them all running properly. The old setup looked as follows…
1 x Intel Dual Quad Xeon w/32GB RAM
1 x Intel Dual Dual Xeon w/16GB RAM
1 x Acer AC100 Xeon w/16GB RAM
2 x i7 9xx w/24GB RAM
2 x HP Microservers w/16GB RAM for storage
Each had additional Intel dual port NICs added, and all were running Windows Server 2012 with Hyper-V (apart from the MIcroServers). Each of them were populated with their maximum memory capability, but these limited maximums were the problem – too many machines were running for a limited number of VMs (if you are familiar with the CIE VMs you know how needy they can be).
Due to the willingness of friends and family to receive perfectly capable machines, I was able to clear out the equipment I wanted to dispose of very quickly, and ended up with the following.
1 x Dell T7600 Dual Xeon w/72GB RAM
1 x Acer AC100 Xeon w/16GB of RAM
I overshot the mark a little, as I should have held onto one of the other machines for shared storage, so I’m back in the market again for something that plays well with Storage Spaces and has a bunch of drive bays ready for filling,and that are easily identifiable. As easy as it would be to do a frankenbuild, I’d rather spend a bit more and get something that is built for this task, so I’ve got some research to do. While Storage Spaces isn’t currently challenging the storage vendors, when MS throws their weight behind something, it normally takes hold, so I can foresee a much stronger presence in the future.
There were also some tweaks to wireless networking equipment, with some AC1750 access points being deployed, one in bridge mode to bring a reception deadspot to life. The original plan was to replace the current router/access point with one of these units, but unfortunately it proved to be a bottleneck on the 100 Mb/s connection I have at home, so I will need to test some other devices before that project continues.