Servers on eBay.....

[ThorpedoUK]

Just wondered if anybody knew where the majority of small businesses on ebay get there regular supply of "old" servers from? You see a lot of DL380's // Dell 2650's etc on there which are really good work horses, I could actually do with a rack of them right now until I can afford something more substantial, any ideas where these guys pick them up?

I'm assuming it is liquidated // recycled corporate stock, just no idea where you would find these auctions.

Anyone got any ideas?

Thanks v much!

 

[ThorpedoUK]

I just wondered because some of the kit on there (imho) goes for an absolute bargain, for example I recently saw 3 x Dell Poweredge 6850's go with Quad 3.16GHz Xeons (old but 64bit) 4GB RAM (64GB capable machine) and 3x72GB (U320 admittedly but still decent amount of storage), all three were sold separately and the most one went for was about £139, the rest £100 and £110!!!

That is a steal at that price when you can collect, I know its a 4U and drinks power but for me, it would have to go in a DC anyway.

Anyone here picked up any server bargains on there?

 

[ThorpedoUK]

This. Support and warrenty is a major thing for most compaines. If drives or any other hardware fails its still in warrently. Any of our hard drives that are old than about 3 years, regardless of warrently, get replaced. No point in losing company data or downtime due to broken hardware just because you didnt upgrade for 5 years. Wouldnt consider buying second hand.

We have SAS drives and backup tapes at the moment but will be going down the root of SAN storage soon. Only problem is that its going to cost a huge stack of money for the SAN (20k at least) Then the price of Citrix essentials for XenServer and we are now also looking at MS Sharepoint. Expensive times...good job its not my money!

Just out of interest, what price did you get quoted for Citrix essentials (XenServer), I was looking at that too, mainly for the HA functionality (XenMotion is good but not so good if the host fails at 3am, although chances are I'd be playing BFBC2 anyway atm , that game is addictive!)

Nothing wrong with SAS drives, they are fine, we are using NetApp SAN's here with hardware mirroring, they work absolutely great with VMware!

I can see your guys point about the power these old servers drink, but as the guy above said, for a virtualisation lab they are a bargain (when you don't have to pay for the juice).

 

[ThorpedoUK]

Two different clients mate, one using VMWare ESX (vSphere 4) on 2 x 6850's with quad dual core procs, 32GB RAM each connected to a NetApp SAN which hardware mirrors to its opposite at another site, this was built and deployed in 2005 // 2006 when XenServer was not fully developed (or free).

Second client has 2 x R610's (dual quad cores) with 32GB RAM and XenServer 5.5 connected to a MD3000i in a pooler master scenario, this is running quite a lot of apps at ease at the moment, these new Dell servers are superb - apps it is running are: Win 2008 64 bit all round, XenApp 5 (6 is ok but WIN2K8 R2 is annoyingly bug ridden imho), XenDesktop 4, Active Dir // DNS, Citrix Secure Gateway, SQL Server 2005 etc...

XenServer is configured with multipathing enabled (iSCSI) and XenMotion, all of which is free out of the box - pretty awesome.

You should seriously consider downloading the trial version of XenApp 5 (or 6) and definately XenDesktop (get the express edition, it is free and has 10 licenses) that in particular is extremely cool software to play around with.