Infrastructure Upgrades

For the better part of 3 years I have hosted several mustang forums and other stuff on a pair of Dell 2650 servers. At first, there was just local storage inside of the two servers, and then I moved to an MSA1000 Fiber Channel SAN that I picked up on the cheap. Along the way, I’ve also added a PIX firewall, and Cisco switch, but have always been stuck with the Dell servers.

However recently I purchased two DL365 G1 servers, so the plan is to decommission the Dell’s and replace them with two new (to me) HP DL365’s. It will bump my cluster from 8Ghz CPU power and 12GB of ram up to 20Ghz CPU power and 18.5GB ram (to start anyway). The new servers also have 4GB Fiber Channel cards installed so eventually the next step will be to upgrade from the MSA1000 to something that supports 4GB Fiber Channel…. Probably something HP or EMC.

All together I have just under $500 dollars invested in this upgrade (which the wife is undoubtedly going to complain about), but what it will provide seems priceless to someone stuck with VI3.5:

  • Upgrade to vSphere 4.1
  • Can run 64-bit guests
  • Can add more than 6GB ram per host
  • Have iLO2 Advanced instead of crappy Dell DRAC for remote reboots
  • Reduced page load time (from 2-5 seconds now down to half a second)

Besides the obvious I hope to be able to test out VMware View 4.5 as a hosted desktop type solution… myself and friends will probably be test subjects…or whoever I can get to agree to learn some new stuff.  And maybe even offer some VM space to the guys I work with provided I can acquire more external IP addresses.

I will post updates as I get time to install the new gear.

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