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I'm looking to do a little virtualization project at work for around $500 (small business, was like pulling teeth to get this much, and we'll add more ram and what not as we go along) including ram and ssd. I was going to just suggest the Xeon based Lenovo TS140, since I have one at home and love it, but the price on them has shot up by $150-$200 which eats the entire budget pretty much. Right now they are looking at older i7 desktops, which may get the job done but meh. Can anyone offer a recommendation for something new or used that would be similar? It having ECC RAM isn't a need, nothing super important will be running on it. We'll mainly be using it to train people on different OSes and how to troubleshoot them.
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Jan 22, 2016 02:31
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Pretty much anything will do that kind of basic-level virtualization these days. Unless you have stringent hardware requirements, just shove a bunch of memory into anything made in the last 3 years.
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Jan 22, 2016 03:48
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Bored this afternoon at work and I need to get off my rear end and study to take the vcp 5.5 since I already took the class, so I'm getting this set up from our pile of crap for studying. Should be good enough for an initial setup, with 64gb each. E: 32, not 64. Still good enough. 
devmd01 fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Jan 22, 2016 |
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Jan 22, 2016 19:56
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KillHour posted:Can someone sanity check this before I spend all night implementing it? This only includes the IP stuff - I'll be adding a virtual SAN at some point.
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Jan 22, 2016 21:29
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:I don't have anything to add on the sanity check portion, but I both wanted to make sure this wasn't missed by everyone else on the new page, and throw out major kudos on the complexity of the home lab, getting some real work done. Much better than the "I have ESXi and built a domain controller" approach. That looks awesome. Hopefully not a dumb question, how many boxes would you need to run that kind of setup at home, or could it all done on a single box? Would GNS3 be used for the routers?
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Jan 22, 2016 23:05
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GNS3 would not work for the routers, most likely pfsense VMs or something similar. GNS3 great for testing, horrible for anything close to production. Check this for throughput numbers for the old Cisco hardware running in GNS3. The most beefy hardware you can run (7200) has a max throughput on ASICs at 40mbit, GNS3 does all of this in software so you'll get a fraction of that. http://www.cisco.com/web/partners/downloads/765/tools/quickreference/routerperformance.pdf Fatal fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 02:07
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Fatal posted:GNS3 would not work for the routers, most likely pfsense VMs or something similar. GNS3 great for testing, horrible for anything close to production. I was totally going to use GNS3, so thanks for saying this before I hit a brick wall. I have a pair of E5-2650 v1 procs, 32GB of RAM, a 1TB HDD, and a 320GB IoDrive. I just ordered another 64GB since apparently emulating network devices uses a poo poo ton of RAM. All I have up so far is a pair of Server 2012 R2 core domain controllers, an iSCSI SAN, 3 instances of ESXi, and a vCenter appliance. Hopefully 96GB and 16 cores will be enough, because I'm not exactly flush with cash right now. MC Fruit Stripe posted:I don't have anything to add on the sanity check portion, but I both wanted to make sure this wasn't missed by everyone else on the new page, and throw out major kudos on the complexity of the home lab, getting some real work done. Much better than the "I have ESXi and built a domain controller" approach. That looks awesome. Thanks. I really feel like unless you deploy like you're in a real datacenter, you're not going to learn anything useful. Disclaimer: I've never been responsible for architecting a real datacenter. I've designed tons of distribution networks, though. KillHour fucked around with this message at 03:06 on Jan 23, 2016 |
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Jan 23, 2016 03:00
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I currently have the following in my cart for CCNA: 1x Cisco 3550 2x Cisco 2950 2x Cisco 2621 12. Does this all seem about right? Total comes to around $200, which is 2/3 of any other kit I saw online. I figure I can just get the cabling at work, as I have drawers full of them. The only thing I was worried about was 12.3 IOS not being sufficient.  Edit: Ended up buying two 2621xm, one 3560, one 2811 for IOS 15.1, and two 2950's. And it still costs a lot less than those kits on eBay. InevitableCheese fucked around with this message at 23:44 on Jan 25, 2016 |
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Jan 25, 2016 22:07
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That's not awful, but as someone with CCNA and CCNP under his belt I still don't see the value of real hardware versus GNS3. I know everyone wants to get their hands on real kit because it feels cool and you never know when you might need to know how to, I don't know, make a rollover cable or something, but if I had it to do all over again I would never have touched physical equipment (well, except for one router to get an IOS from  )..The convenience of being able to fire up a dozen routers with the click of a button and not have to sit there next to a jet engine endlessly flipping console cables back and forth is so much preferable to owning some old Cisco kit. To me, anyway. edit: That sounded way harsher than I intended, and by no means did I mean to put you off your purchase. If I could recommend one thing, pull an IOS off your router and fire up GNS3 and donk around with it 
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Jan 25, 2016 23:56
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Aren't the IOS images readily available from Cisco now that the licensing has moved to unlock keys stored in NVRAM? I didn't have to have valid SMARTnet a couple of months back when I got the IOS image for a 1941 that has somehow found its way to me.
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Jan 26, 2016 02:15
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Martytoof posted:That's not awful, but as someone with CCNA and CCNP under his belt I still don't see the value of real hardware versus GNS3. I know everyone wants to get their hands on real kit because it feels cool and you never know when you might need to know how to, I don't know, make a rollover cable or something, but if I had it to do all over again I would never have touched physical equipment (well, except for one router to get an IOS from Yeah, I will probably end up doing both hardware and virtual. I had such a bad time trying to get "other images" working that I ended up buying a rack of stuff. Plus, I don't really have any experiences with actual hardware so I'd rather get that out of the way at home.
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Jan 26, 2016 15:46
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InevitableCheese posted:Yeah, I will probably end up doing both hardware and virtual. I had such a bad time trying to get "other images" working that I ended up buying a rack of stuff. Plus, I don't really have any experiences with actual hardware so I'd rather get that out of the way at home. Yeah, that's how I was when I first started too so I definitely understand the desire to just get your hands on kit Good luck!
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Jan 26, 2016 18:17
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If all I want to do is get a lab to run ESXi with a bunch of VMs, could I make do with a T140 with an i3 and 32 gigs of ram?
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Jan 31, 2016 00:44
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Swagger Dagger posted:If all I want to do is get a lab to run ESXi with a bunch of VMs, could I make do with a T140 with an i3 and 32 gigs of ram? I would strongly suggest not going with an i3 for lack of core resource availability.
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Jan 31, 2016 01:18
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Yeah, there are only a few reasons to buy hardware for CCNA to CCNP.
If you can check off those two boxes then there is no reason to get switches. Definitely don't need to get routers, that can be handled with GNS3 + a second NIC to connect to the above switch (for router on a stick). Cisco Labs are also a good alternative if you don't want to setup GNS3 (although I consider that in and of itself a good learning opportunity). Fatal fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Feb 4, 2016 |
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Feb 4, 2016 17:54
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I'm like 99.999% sure you can do STP in a switchport-enabled IOS image in GNS3 But your point stands.
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Feb 4, 2016 23:48
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It's been a few years since I've really touched my home server environment, so I've been slowly preparing for an overhaul. The original implementation, while simple, succeeded in getting my hands-on learning with storage, virtualization, and networking. It basically consisted of a l3 switch, a freenas box and an esxi box. I've since consumed most of those resources for my home "production" environment. While the hardware was sufficient, old consumer grade stuff I had lying around isn't terribly reliable. Picked up a cheap 25U rack that I've set up in a downstairs closet to keep everything out of sight and earshot, although I'm still fiddling with ideas on how to cool it properly without taking the doors off. Should only really become a major issue when I add more hardware. Replacement production server is just about complete, should be able to do a burn-in for a couple days when I get the memory in tomorrow, just before heading out of town for the weekend. I really should have just gone with a last-gen E5 but my dumbass decided to get a fancy new X11 supermicro board and a skylake e3v5, which only supports ddr4 ecc udimm's. Apparently nobody uses this memory since my only option was to buy direct from crucial. With 64GB, should be plenty of horsepower for everything I need in addition to some VM's for openstack controllers. Once I set everything up I'll post up some pics. Need to make some cables when I get some time because apparently all I had were super long and super short cables. Also still debating on if I want to use zfsonlinux or btrfs, but since I have a full backup of my data I'll likely re-build my array for speed rather than redundancy.
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Feb 23, 2016 22:14
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I was told to post here about suggestions for a home server for esxi and Cisco cucm labbing. I thought I would get a used c200 or something but I would appreciate any feedback on better options and am happy to build my own.
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Mar 3, 2016 16:51
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The Lenovo TS140 seems to be a thread favorite. There's also the HP ML10 v2 at a similar price point, and you can get either of them with a dual core hyperthreaded i3 or a quad core Xeon.
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Mar 3, 2016 23:30
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Is the i3 powerful enough to handle multiple vms?
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Mar 4, 2016 14:57
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Bigass Moth posted:Is the i3 powerful enough to handle multiple vms? That's 2 cores, so as soon as you exceed two vms, you're going to have contention. This might not be a problem depending on the OS, (I think), especially if you've got good solid state storage. I would go with i5 at a minimum.
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Mar 4, 2016 17:52
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I also would recommend i5 at a minimum, however I will say the same thing here that I have said every time I have posted - remember, it's a home lab, and not production. You're basically never going to be using more than about 2 of the VMs at a time. You might write a query on your Win7 box which'll hit your SQL box, or you might vMotion a VM from 1 host to another, but you're never going to be doing some massive stress test of your environment. Or, if you are, you'll have moved well past a single i3 or i5 box by then. Hell when I build VMs at home, my life's goal is to use as little memory as possible to hammer as many VMs in as I can. My domain controller has like 800mb. In production I give it 4gb because 'eh', but at home, find the bare minimum I can use comfortably and go. MC Fruit Stripe fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Mar 4, 2016 |
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Mar 4, 2016 20:09
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SamDabbers posted:The Lenovo TS140 seems to be a thread favorite. There's also the HP ML10 v2 at a similar price point, and you can get either of them with a dual core hyperthreaded i3 or a quad core Xeon. Just doubled my ram in mine to 32 gigs. Great little box.
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Mar 4, 2016 20:29
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I'd go for an i5 or something like the TS440 if you can spring for it(http://www.amazon.com/Lenovo-ThinkServer-TS440-70AQ0009UX-E3-1225V3/dp/B00HEK9A8M) just because the marginal price over an i3 is small, but focus on memory and then SSD space for your home lab. ram and space for VMs are at a far bigger premium for me compared to processor power. I picked up the server in the link, added a 500gb SSD and 16 gigs of ram and it's been far beyond anything I can max out so far (AD/DNS, two web servers and and a VCSA instance. Plus a virtual test domain and test web servers).
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Mar 4, 2016 20:57
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Dr. Arbitrary posted:That's 2 cores, so as soon as you exceed two vms, you're going to have contention. This might not be a problem depending on the OS, (I think), especially if you've got good solid state storage. Most people use consolidation ratios of 4 or even 8 vcpus to cores in production environments, a lab certainly isn't going to do 1 to 1. If you're doing NUCs you're probably doing multiple ones in a cluster so the 2 core limitation isn't that serious.
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Mar 4, 2016 21:33
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GobiasIndustries posted:TS440 Ask me about using 2200 of these in production and rather than springing for a RAID card we use the software RAID. Also ask me about how large I/O can cause the server to lock up, start verifying the RAID integrity and then lockup so you have to reboot them from the AMT. We finally got a fixed driver from intel (through lenovo) so it marks the drives defunct instead of locking up every night.... only took a year for that to happen.
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Mar 4, 2016 21:42
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MF_James posted:Ask me about using 2200 of these in production and rather than springing for a RAID card we use the software RAID. Also ask me about how large I/O can cause the server to lock up, start verifying the RAID integrity and then lockup so you have to reboot them from the AMT. We finally got a fixed driver from intel (through lenovo) so it marks the drives defunct instead of locking up every night.... only took a year for that to happen. Wow that really sucks, I'm glad my home lab hasn't run into any of those issues because I'm not using it in production.
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Mar 4, 2016 21:48
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MF_James posted:Ask me about using 2200 of these in production and rather than springing for a RAID card we use the software RAID. Also ask me about how large I/O can cause the server to lock up, start verifying the RAID integrity and then lockup so you have to reboot them from the AMT. We finally got a fixed driver from intel (through lenovo) so it marks the drives defunct instead of locking up every night.... only took a year for that to happen. I have one of these, I run Linux from the Megaraid card that's included. I guess the software RAID you mention does not include this card right? Otherwise I might have a problem.
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Mar 5, 2016 08:58
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Mr Shiny Pants posted:I have one of these, I run Linux from the Megaraid card that's included. I guess the software RAID you mention does not include this card right? Otherwise I might have a problem. Our client opted out of the megaraid card because that would have cost an extra $100 per machine, not a good spot to penny pinch.
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Mar 7, 2016 14:53
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There's some pretty good deals on older refurbished Dell stuff right now at dellrefurbished.com which is Dell Financial Services. There's slickdeals coupons for 50% off everything but laptops and 40% off laptops: https://slickdeals.net/f/8555629-dell-refurbished-coupon-laptops-40-off-desktops-50-off-shipping?v=1 quote:50% Off at DellRefurbished.com I picked up an optiplex 990 (i5-2400) for about $182 shipped. Some slickdeals folks are picking up dual 6 core Xeons for under $500 and that kind of thing.
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Mar 11, 2016 22:36
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Is there a good GNS3 CCNA/CCNP workbook? All of the prep books are either really theory heavy or not geared specifically to GNS3, and I find that Lammle's book really dumbs everything down while the Odom book drags everything out way too much. I'd like a step-by-step exercise guide for setting up every lab in the syllabus specifically in GNS3 and then separately a book that is just theory. Any recommendations?
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Mar 12, 2016 19:08
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Chickenwalker posted:Is there a good GNS3 CCNA/CCNP workbook? All of the prep books are either really theory heavy or not geared specifically to GNS3, and I find that Lammle's book really dumbs everything down while the Odom book drags everything out way too much. I also have the same question. I took CCNA classes in high school 12 years ago, went on a little adventure for a decade since no one where i was from would hire an 18 year old kid to work on this equipment. However, I am now employed at a networking equipment manufacturer and think it might be time to renew my certifications. I'm not sure where to begin, or where to go. Help
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Mar 14, 2016 11:32
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Sorry if this has been answered before, but I only had a few minutes at lunch at work to write this. I'm studying for my CCENT/CCNA and wanted to build a home lab. I've got 2 1841s that I got from my old work with the blue cables and power. Without spending too much, what should I invest in to have a decent basic lab for these courses? I've seen a bunch of sites saying to have 3 routers and 3 switches to get the most out of it; considering what I have are there any recommendations of things to buy or avoid?
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Mar 22, 2016 04:11
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You really don't need a lab for the CCENT/CCNA. GNS3 or packet tracer is more than sufficient. If you just really want some hardware, I picked up a 2600 series router and a 3350 catalyst switch a couple of years ago for like a hundred bucks total just to play with and that worked fine. You might want another switch or two to play around with spanning tree and another router to mess with routing protocols but again, GNS3 works plenty fine for that.
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Mar 22, 2016 06:01
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iajanus posted:Sorry if this has been answered before, but I only had a few minutes at lunch at work to write this. To echo what everyone else has said you really REALLY dont need a home lab for the CCNA. Just go out and get PacketTracer or GSN3, or if you want to spend some money Boson NetSim is really good.
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May 11, 2016 15:44
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I think everyone WANTS a lab just because it looks boss, but the reality is that everything you will need you can do cheaper and more efficiently with GNS3 and one or two IOS images. And I don't mean to be derogatory when I say that. I was the exact same way. Someone told me to use PacketTracer but I spent big bucks on switches, routers, terminal servers, etc. In the end I sold it all for a loss. I won't say I didn't get use out of it. I did. It was a good learning experience, but in hindsight I would not have invested that money again.
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May 11, 2016 16:57
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And for virtualization, if your work has some older decommissioned servers (and maybe even storage!) lying around, talk to your boss and see if you can use them for lab use "after hours." Better yet, run it in your company's datacenter so they're paying for the electricity. Why spend money if you don't have to?  
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May 12, 2016 16:42
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devmd01 posted:And for virtualization, if your work has some older decommissioned servers (and maybe even storage!) lying around, talk to your boss and see if you can use them for lab use "after hours." Better yet, run it in your company's datacenter so they're paying for the electricity. Why spend money if you don't have to? And have the network team on your rear end because you are the greatest liability ever? Better not.
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May 12, 2016 16:59
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lol just lol, not everyone works in a megacorp, I can throw a pen across the room and hit our network person. I can tear down and rebuild our production vmware cluster all day long; i'm not going to break anything on the network by running a separate vmware cluster on a completely different network segment, calm the gently caress down.
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May 12, 2016 18:23
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devmd01 posted:lol just lol, not everyone works in a megacorp, I can throw a pen across the room and hit our network person. I can tear down and rebuild our production vmware cluster all day long; i'm not going to break anything on the network by running a separate vmware cluster on a completely different network segment, calm the gently caress down. Well I am the network guy in a small place now, and I definitely wouldn't let anyone experiment in our data center.
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May 12, 2016 18:38
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