2020-08-01 20:21:00
The Dell R410 in my homelab has served me very well so far! With a little upgrade of its memory it's run 20 VMs without any hassle. Finding this particular configuration when I did (at a refurbishing company) was a lucky strike: a decent price for a good pair of Xeons and two large disks.
I've been wanting to expand my homelab, to mess around with vMotion, Veeam and other cool stuff. Add in the fact that I'd love to offer "my" students a chance to work with "real" virtualization (using my smaller R410) and you've got me scouring various sources for a somewhat bigger piece of kit. After trying a Troostwijk auction and poking multiple refurbishers I struck gold on the Tweakers.net classified ads!
Pictured above is my new Dell R710, the slightly beefier sister of the R410. It has space for more RAM, for more disk drives and most importantly (for my own sanity): it's a 2U box with larger fans which produces a lot less noise than the R410. The seller even included the original X5550 CPUs seperately.
So! From the get-go I decided to Frankenstein the two boxes, so I could actually put the R410 to use for my students while keeping a bit more performance in my homelab.
Moving that RAID1 set from the R410 to the R710 was an exciting exercise!
I really did not want to loose all of my VMs and homelab; I've put a year into the environment so far! Officially and ideally, I would setup VMware ESXi on the R710 and then migrate the VMs to the new host. There are many methods:
Couldn't I do it even faster? Well sure, but you can't simply move RAID sets between servers! Most importantly: you'll need similar or the same RAID controllers. In a very lucky break, both the R410 and the R710 have the Dell/LSI Perc 6i. So, on a wish and a prayer, I pludged the RAID set and told the receiving Perc 6i to import foreign configuration. And it worked!
After booting ESXi from the SD card, it did not show any of the actual data which was a not-so-fun surprise. Turns out that one manual re-mount of the VMFS file system did the trick! All 24 VMs would boot!
So far she's a beaut! Now, onwards, to prep the R410 for my students.
kilala.nl tags: sysadmin, work,
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