eBay servers for test environment?

Five_Star

Five_Star

Five_Star

Associate
Joined
20 Oct 2002
Posts
1,127
Location
Redcar
We have no test environment at work and I’ve been pestering people for a budget to get a couple of machines in so we can get a test environment for our failover clustering setup.

Only problem is there is very little budget, £500 max for hardware.

What are people’s opinion on getting a few Dell machines from eBay? I was thinking some 2950 III or 1950 III but they'll all be 4-5+ years old by now.

Has anyone done this and what has the reliability been like?

The alternative is no test environment, but don’t want to create a hardware nightmare for myself.
 
Have you looked at a cloud option like Microsoft Azure?

Edit Re-Read] Also just to add, do you currently have a DR Setup, or are you running Prod with no DR? If the later, how business critical is the failover clust that you're proposing? As a failover clust isn't a test, but should be equal with Prod.
 
Last edited:
Not done it with kit from eBay but we do have a lab environment at work I have access to which has quite a few "older" servers in it (for those times when you need something physical rather than just slapping another VM on the lab infrastructure).

Mostly HP DL360 G3's but there are some Dells of about the same age too ... but we have pile of them so if something breaks then we can just swap bits (or full servers in). Although I think that only hardware issue I've had was one hard disk and an FC cable which someone managed to kink. Doing some testing at the moment which involves a HP DL360 G3, a Dell 2950 (of some sort my colleague built that one) and two Dell M610 blades (loan kit).

But note that these are in a dedicated lab environment and not a "lab" which can slide into production ...
 
Last edited:
I know what the best practice is, and because of that I know we are not even close to following it. At present we have nothing, no DR at all just the HA cluster.

I'm hoping to recruit some junior staff to take care of things while I'm at a clients site so want to get them up to speed with things and use it as a stepping stone to getting a proper DR solution tested as well. If our new client comes off we'll have the reason to invest in proper DR (they pretty much require you have it or implement it to win)

I just wanted to know if people had gone down this route, its the usual small business problems of needing to do a lot with a little.
 
What sort of things are you thinking of doing on the test environment? It might be worth looking at something like a HP ML110 G6. We've got one as our main office server (we're only a small company) and they're great. We did an install for a charity using an ML110 G6 as well and they're very happy with it.

You could probably get them for fairly reasonable prices on ebay now that the G8's are out.
 
I really want two physical machines so we can duplicate the setup of our HA cluster as it is now in hardware / software terms, mostly for testing and education.

This will be expanded to cover virtualising the two physical machines in future so we can move them about more easily.

I only suggested dell as we've got some R510s already
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom