For the helluva it I thought I'd post something.
I recently went to another tier in my home server setup. Being that I do still focus on virtualization as part of my job... and am expanding into desktop virt and such I needed a bit more horse power behind the scenes.
So after watching and pricing out a billion configs on Newegg, I finally pulled the trigger and built myself a hot lil rig.
The machine runs Server 2008 and Hyper-V only, no other roles/services are on it and everything else is in various VMs. This server complements my existing 2 host Hyper-V cluster for demo purposes.
My previous rig was a Q9300 @3Ghz with 16GB of ram, it did well, but this new righ is f'n ballistic compared to it.
The rig:
- Case - Lian Li PC-A70F Chassis. This thing had the room I needed to expand storage later on, and also fit what I needed to put in there.
- Mobo - SuperMicro X8DT3-LN4F - Dual Xeon W/ onboard 8 port LSI SAS headers, 4 Gbit NIC's (Intel Server class offloading NICs that support VMq), and 12 ram slots. Sporting the Intel 5520 chipset.
- CPUs- 2x Intel Xeon E5620 (Westmere-EP) processors. Running at stock speeds (2.4Ghz) 4 core w/ HT. So 16 logical threads. Running Intel HSF's that are PWM'd by the Mobo and are almost silent most of the time. I went with the Westmere due to the fact they are cool running and still fast as hell. (and 12MB cache)
- Ram -24GB Kingston (4GB chips, 6 of em, ECC, Registered) much room for expansion!
Everything else was recycled from the old server.
Internal storage is 6x 1TB hd's (4 in a RAID 0 array, 2 in a RAID 1 array), and then there are 6x 250GB 2.5" drives in a RAID 10 array.
Then 5x 3.5" bays filled with 3x 250GB drives in a RAID 0, and 1x 750GB for a library disk, and 1x 1TB drive for nightly backups of some important VM's and data.
Disk controllers are:
Areca 1230 12x SATA hardware RAID controller with 1GB cache and BBU.
Adaptec 1430SA - 4x SATA controller (this was put in because there were issues with the intel onboard SATA ports, the mobo is being RMA'd to fix that)
LSI 1680 oboard SAS controller 8x SAS/SATA ports.
Oh and an unused CrystalFontz 635 was put in just for shits and giggles. Shows some fun stats like data flow through the VM switch, current per CPU averages for all the cores utilization and the current CPU Mhz at any given time. The machine is stashed in a closet so I never see the CF display anyway
I have an iSCSI SAN also running in the env leveraging a small Foxconn Atom nettop PC running Windows Storage Server 2008 R2. Works OK, but is a bit slow.