New home server environment

Well, with the days off I took, plus a few extra bits of hardware, things are shaping up nicely.

Hyper-V server
Motherboard: Asus P5E-VM HDMI LGA775
RAM: 2x2GB & 2x1GB Mushkin PC2
CPU: Intel E6400 2.13GHz
Disks: 160GB Seagate SATA for boot, 8x1TB WD Black in RAID5
Cards: Dell-branded LSI 8408 Dual SAS w. SAS-SATA breakout cables, Intel PRO/1000 CT nic

Running 2008 R2 x64 with Hyper-V and the Starwind iSCSI target. The RAID5 array is broken down into three 1.8TB and one 1TB logical disks, the former being used as VMFS iSCSI datastores and the latter using NFS and SMB shares for ISOs, files, etc. The VHDs for the Hyper-V part of the server are also stored on this disk.

The Starwind was super-easy to set up, only hitch I ran into was that I needed to restart the Starwind/iSCSI initiator services to get ESX seeing the LUNs. Performance is 'just fine' so far - nothing empirical to report, yet.

The on-board nic is used for LAN access, while the CT card is used for iSCSI, each on their own separate Gb switches (a Dell 2708 and D-Link Green, both 8-port). I had to disable the Hyper-V vSwitch to get LAN access working properly...so may need to tinker with that yet. Also, had to disable the firewall to get iSCSI working, even with the proper in/outbound rules enabled. I'm guessing there are some ports needed that are not documented or somesuch. Both ESX and Hyper-V have 3260 open, so not sure what else is needed.

Still trying to decide what to do with the Hyper-V box...for sure a VC is going on there, not sure what else yet. 6GB doesn't give me a huge amount of room, especially with a VC in the works that'll need 2-3GB of RAM just for itself.

ESX vSphere server
Motherboard: Asus P6T SE X58 LGA1366
RAM: 6x2GB G.Skill DDR3-1600
CPU: Intel i7 920 2.66GHz
Disks: 36GB SATA Raptor
Cards: Two Intel PRO/1000 CT nics

Running ESX 4.0 (or vSphere, as it's being called). I've not separated the service console from the VM Network, as I needed the second nic for iSCSI, and due to the strict HCL, I cannot use the on-board nic. Still need to get the VC operational.

Plans are to run a 2008 R2 domain for MCITP purposes, as well as a few BSD/Asterisk machines for some other work I'm doing.

I'll try and keep more posted here in future, I've been lax about it as of late.

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