Portable servers?

SiD the Turtle · 31 Mar 2010 at 14:13

Hi all,

We run a number of Microsoft training courses, mostly on customer sites. This means every few years buying a dozen high spec laptops to run virtual copies of whatever server applications we want to provide training for.

This is becoming prohibitively expensive given that most of the laptops have a low resale value at the end of their life due to their age and the amount of abuse they receive and that Microsoft's upcoming product stack (SQL 2008 R2, MOSS 210 etc) needs more RAM that you can buy in a laptop to run at a decent speed.

So the idea I've been floating around is some kind of portable server, able to host say three or four machines for training purposes. My main concerns are twofold: does such a product exist or will I have to end up say building an i7-based Shuttle with a tonne of RAM and what can I do about protecting it from shocks? Our laptops are shipped around the country by courier in large, well padded flight cases and are fine, but as soon as we start talking about a real piece of kit with add in boards, heavy heatsinks etc, I'm worried it's going to end up falling apart.

SiD the Turtle · 31 Mar 2010 at 21:51

Cheers for all of the advice guys.

Remote access isn't an option, though I wish it was, a lot of our customer have shoddy net access or their training room has no network points, plus one of our other partners (who shall remain nameless) provides training facilities though Citrix based remote access and our trainers face the same issues.

I like the idea of a rack flight case though, I could pick up a relatively cheap 1u or 2u server, pack it with ram and send it out.

I'll do some more research, though any more advice is appreciated!

SiD the Turtle · 1 Apr 2010 at 22:51

Heheh lots of pros and cons here guys.

As far as location goes, customers love us being able to roll up to their office and deliver training, it's cheaper than paying the expenses for staff to travel to a training centre and it means that they can back to work with no excuses about having to travel. On the professionalism side of things I can see why turning up with a shuttle might look a bit two bit, but then I stole the idea from this Microsoft dude, who visited us a little while ago with such a server: http://blogs.technet.com/andrew/archive/2010/02/19/using-hyper-v-to-make-a-demo-sandbox.aspx.

Lastly, it's impossible to demand a net connection, some companies simply don't have the bandwidth, or are security concious and don't have outside lines.

SiD the Turtle · 2 Apr 2010 at 12:51

Controversial indeed, I'd be open to it but I need a machine that can run MS Hyper-V