Home Lab Setup

I've been building OCS labs on and off for the past few years since I left IT and moved to presales (the Dark side). The infrastructure for this is virtualised on a number of servers in the pre-stage area in our offices. It is used for stuff like engineer training and customer PoCs where OCS is being integrated with another VoIP manufacturer's systems. As the driver for each lab build is usually testing for a specific customer project I have been finding that I'm not getting as much time as I want to check out all the new OCS features, especially since R2 has been released.

Soo, I've decided to build my own lab at home...

Home Lab Infrastructure Build

The brief for the lab is pretty straight forward:

• Be able to run 32- and 64-bit guest OS (OCS 2007 R2 - all roles, Exchange 2007 and 2010)
• Low power consumption so I can have it running 24/7 and not be killing too many polar bears
• With the above in mind, as many spindles as possible per host machine
• As much RAM as poss per host machine
• As cheap as possible

I'm starting the lab with my existing Dell E520 which I use for gaming and web browsing and at this stage I want to continue to use it as my home desktop PC. This means the decision on virtulisation software is already made:

• Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V - Nope, would mean having to run Server 2008 as the host OS - not ideal for gaming
• VMware ESXi - Nope, can't use the box for anything else
• VMware Server - Yep, can continue to use the box for gaming and stuff

The Dell E520 has the following spec at the mo:

• Intel Core 2 1.86GHz 6300XFX GeForce 9800 GT (yep, not really critical for a virtual machine host)
• OCZ StealthXStream 600W PSU (had to get this for the graphics card)
• Hitachi DeskStar 7K160 7,200 RPM 160Gb SATA HDD

I'm planning to upgrade the box to the max 8Gb RAM and chuck in 2 more SATA HDDs that I have kicking around from previous upgrades to give me more spindles to spread the VMs across. For the mem upgrade I've already ordered the following from eBuyer:

4Gb (2x2Gb) Crucial DDR2 800MHz PC-6400 Ballistix CL4 2.0V http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143844

This will be enough to get me started on building the guest machines and I'll order the second set of 4Gb RAM when I've hit capacity - Exchange UM is going to be the biggest killer on mem I reckon.

Once this is up and running and I have a few VMs live I plan to benchmark the power consumption with an energy monitor similar to this: http://www.maplin.co.uk/Module.aspx?moduleno=38343

Based on the results of this I can work out if it will be more cost effective to rip out the 600W PSU and GeForce 9800 GT and put this into a new gaming machine and run the E520 purely as a virtualisation platform.