Small Tower Server Recommendations

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Hi, I'm after a mini tower server to run Hyper V 2012 with 4 or 5 VMs as a home lab (DC, SCCM, SQL etc)

Budget is around £450-£500 excluding extra storage/memory. I have looked at Lenovo TS140, Fujitsu TX140 and Dell T20 but cant decide which one to go for so any advice or feedback on these systems or any others would be great.

I haven't ruled out building one but think my budget may be too small?
 
I have a PowerEdge T110 II and am very happy with it. It is extremely quiet.
 
If it's just a personal lab for learning, playing and testing things out. Then save your money and use an old desk top and cram as much memory as you can into it. Looking at your wish list of VM's you're going to need 12-16Gbytes of RAM. Make sure the CPU supports visualization, the AMD and Intel websites will confirm if compatible.

The problem with servers especially the low cost ones is they have limited memory and are expensive to add more.

If you are worried about compatibility then a trick I learned for VMWare ESX server which has specific requirements, in-particular network cards. Is to run VMPlayer on top of Linux or Window7 and run ESX server as virtual machine. ESX5.5 would NOT run natively on my host, since TP-link NICs are not supported. VMPlayer layer removes a lot of hardware compatibility issues. Runs perfectly good enough for testing and learning, infact I develop SQL cluster designs using this method.

I guess you should be able to do similar with Hyper-V?
 
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An older ML330 G6 should be able to run that fine and available for about £250.

I'm running one with 3 2012 R2 VMs and it's barely ticking over :cool:

edit: missed the word "mini" - the 330 is not so mini!
 
I've got a pair of Lenovo TS140's. Great performance for the price, 32GB, and you barely know they're on. Lenovo are dong a £50 cashback per server to. I paid £460 each.
 
Get on ebay and buy a ML110 G6 with a Xeon, should cost no more than £150.

Buy 16GB or 32GB of normal DDR3 then a couple of 128GB or 256GB SSD's and use them as the datastores.

Well under £500 in total.

Happy days.
 
BillHicksRIP said:
I've got a pair of Lenovo TS140's. Great performance for the price, 32GB, and you barely know they're on. Lenovo are dong a £50 cashback per server to. I paid £460 each.
Click to expand...

Yes I have read reviews about them being quiet. Fujitsu seem to be doing £50 cash back too and their server is slightly better spec but not sure on noise/power consumption
 
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