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March 18th, 2014 09:00
Dell PowerEdge 1900
Hi Everyone, I am planning to built a home lab for training purposes and would like to know if buying this machine will good enough. I would like to have a home lab that I could play around windows server 2008/2012 and install hyper-v role and etc.... will this machine with specification below support virtualization? Dell Poweredge 1900 Windows Server 2008 Data center 2x Quad core Xeon processor's X5355 16 GB DDR2 ECC RAM 6x 500GB HDD's 7200RPM PERC 5I RAID controller (RAID 1, 2,5,10,50) looking forward to your suggestion - thanks-iamynoht
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theflash1932
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March 18th, 2014 10:00
Yes, your configuration is fine for playing with virtualization.
Your slow drives can easily become a bottleneck if you get too many virtual machines going - I would recommend a RAID 10 with your drives. You could also do three RAID 1's, giving separate "disks" to more virtual machines. You could also do a 2-disk RAID 1 and a 4-disk RAID 10. You could also do two separate RAID 5's, although the performance would be worse than RAID 10 ... but you CANNOT do a single RAID 5 - a single RAID 5 would give you 2.5TB of space, but you CANNOT boot the OS on a >2TB "disk" on the 1900.
The PERC 5/i can do RAID 0/1/5/10/50 ... not RAID 2.
Your system probably comes with a license for Server 2008, but if you have the ability to upgrade to a newer operating system, Hyper-V has come a LONG way since the first version in Server 2008.
Also note that Server 2008 had an OS option "without Hyper-V" ... so if you do not have the option to enable Hyper-V, that would be why ... make sure you have a version with Hyper-V if that is what you are planning.
iamynoht
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March 18th, 2014 12:00
iamynoht
23 Posts
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March 18th, 2014 13:00
theflash1932
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March 18th, 2014 15:00
When you are configuring RAID in the CTRL-R utility, select only two drives when creating a new virtual disk, then select RAID 1 (check Advanced and Initialize). You can then create the RAID 5 or 10 with the remaining 4 disks, or you can wait until after the OS is installed ... you can even do it from within the OS if you install OpenManage Server Administrator (OMSA).