By beeing a big fan of Exchange and actually getting a 2010 licence, it was a matter of time until I wanted to run it in an productive environment. You’ve maybe noticed my first tries running on this AMD server on OpenSolaris. Well, I would say it was a bit too much for me and I the form factor wasn’t what I really wanted.

So, I saw me looking around for a stable replacement for this, especially because I gave this new AMD machine to my mother to run Win 7 on it, because her old AMD64 was really really End Of Live .

I found a very nice and relatively cheap server. First, I wanted to get a DELL PowerEdge T110. A tower based one. But then I though: Why not put it into your rack? You’ve one and also another 19″ DELL server (a PowerEdge 1650). So I my choice was, after some phone calls while staying for 2 days at the EuropaPark in Rust with the DELL team, a PowerEdge R210 19″ server. (Believe me, it was pure fun to sit in this monorail driving through the park and discussing with the nice sales guy from DELL about the best configuration for what I had in mind).

What I had in mind was a VMware ESXi server. Yeah, I know, I complained a lot about VMware Fusion on Mac, but VMware ESXi seems to be a very different story. Some of you may wonder how I want to manage that, now that I’ve no “PC” back here. Well, running a Win XP VM is easily done and I use one for my regular work in Office 2003 or Office 2007 (depends on the client), so I simply installed the VMware Sphere Client there and what should I say? It works fantastic (on my Mac Pro!). Yes, I moved the Mac Pro back to the office after overhauling the office last week, but that’s a complete different story (Photos are available here by the way).

I’m currently sitting here in front of my cool new GALANT desk, grin broadly like an idiot while running my Win XP SP3 VM on the left 22″ display, typing this and doing the main stuff on the 30″ in front of me while having chats, twitter and the new surveillance (AXIS) cam on the other 22″ on the right. I must say, I’d missed the two 22″ the last few weeks when I was working with the MacBook only. Can’t help myself – I’m simply addicted to screen real estate.

Anyway – to come back to the topic; Anyanka is the name of the VMware ESXi / DELL PowerEdge R210 server. Why? Well, I ran out of names, and yes, it’s chosen from a character of “Buffy – the vampire slayer”

The data of the server:
- DELL PowerEdge R210 Rack Case (up to 2x internal HDs) / 1U
- Intel Xeon X3450 Quad Core CPU (+ HT = 8 Cores – yey!)
- 8GB DDR3-ECC-Regged 1333MHz RAM (4x 2GB Modules / UDIMM (ugh!))
- 160GB SATA HD (which is disconnected until I need it – any day – or not…
- 16x DVD-ROM
- iDRAC6 Embedded BMC (not sure if I could/want to use it and how it works.. but… it’s there)
- NO OS (yes, there’s a license sticker on the top of the case, I just say “THANK YOU DELL ”)
- 250W Power Supply
- 2/4 Post Static Rack Rails

As you can see, it’s a very robust system. The next Xeon in the house which is clocked at the same speed as the Mac Pro CPU. It should have more than enough power to run my few VMs.

Enough the words for the moment, I know you all want to see photos (if you haven’t seen my flickr photos yet), so – here they are

As a design oriented person, I HAD TO order this great looking bezel for the front, I’m sure it will look awesome when it’s in the rack!

Memory & the powerful Intel Xeon X3450 CPU.

An overview above the components built in.

A very good idea, if you want to run a VMware ESXi, IPCop, Endian or a FreeNAS on this machine: the internal USB ports to attach a USB stick and install the OS onto it. I use a 8GB stick to run VMware ESXi on it.

You can see the FULL SET of photos here on flickr.

Maybe you’re wondering why I don’t post photos from the server inside the rack. That’s a not sooo funny story. When I said: Ok, I want to get a 19″ 1U server, I also ordered rails for my older DELL PowerEdge 1650 which will be reused as Endian or IPCop soon. I’ve received the rails and found out, that my rack is NOT for servers. I’ve never noticed that there are no support on the back of the rack, because until today, everything worked fine with the front supports only. Hmm.. so I went to eBay, looking for a small rack and I found one. 15U for only 180 Euros incl. shipping from Poland to here. I’m still waiting for a lifesign and I must admit, that’s this deal seems not to be the cleverest idea I’d ever had, since I paid with PayPal and for 1 week now, never have heard anything from that dealer. I’ve send meanwhile 3 eMails to them and never got a reply. When I don’t get the rack or ANY information, I’ll turn to eBay and cancel it :/

The other question that possibly will come up is: Where do I store my VMs?

That question is easily answered: I’m using one of my Onnto DataTales! Funny enough, this is one of the first servers supporting eSATA! After fiddling around for some hours, my friend Merlin had the idea to put the external RAID to RAID10 (well it’s RAID0+1), to get down to 2TB. The issue is, that the free version of VMware ESXi does NOT recognize HDs greater than 2TB in this version. When it was set to 2TB it worked.

Here’s a photo of the back ports of the R210 I like it!

So that’s it for today! Hope I can show you some more photos of the server built into the a new rack, soon!

Ciao
Dennis

PS. Before I forgot: DELL says the server consumes 107 Watts on Full Load, but only 37 Watts on idle. I’ll check that later and post my results.