Thinking of an old server and stuffing it with consumer grade SSDs to run some VMs

[skyripper]

We have an outsourced IT provider. They're terrible. We're locked in to them.

We have a development team overseas. We want to get a bunch of VMs built for these guys to use.

Each VM only needs around 4GB RAM and 32Gb disk. The provider can build it in 6 weeks.. maybe. If they can free up a techie to work on it. And a project manager. (If we could bypass these guys I would. We can't go cloud and we can't change supplier. I hate them.)

In the meantime, I'm thinking..

A cheap ebay second-hand server with 64GB or more of RAM, 8 or more cores and some form of SATA/SAS controller. So a HP DL380 or Dell equivalent probably from 5 or more years ago.

I'm then thinking of chucking some cheap SSDs in it, running it JBOD and throwing Xenserver on it. I'll use ZFS for redundancy and if a drive fails, we slap another one in and carry on.

I reckon the whole thing can be done for £800 excluding the OS's to run inside the VMs - those are covered by an enterprise licence.

Any pitfalls I should be aware of?
I only needs to work for a couple of months until the outsourcers sort their crap out.

Network traffic will be light and all the databases and other resources are already in proper kit in the datacenter.

 

[paradigm]

Other than the above, I'd personally I'd make sure that you had multiple NICs to handle the traffic and provide a degree of failover/redundancy.

It might also be a prudent move to get two physical hosts in a cluster so as to provide a N+1 capacity, just in case your used/refurbished box fails.

 

[khrall]

Make sure the hardware you pick is on the HCL, this makes life easier.

Also depending on the workload, the consumer SSD drives you pick may have poor endurance, but for the amount of time your looking to use it, I wouldn't be overly concerned. Just make sure you have backups if it has a chance of affecting a whole team.

 

[mejinks]

Firstly, your provider may have written into their ola/sla that any devices you purchase wihout notifying them could incur separate costs for support, even if you don't bring it under their support contract.

Secondly, 5 or 6 year old server hardware would only be able to utilise 3G sata, so SSDs would be a waste.

I'd only use ESXi or Unraid, but I'm a bit biased.

 

[BlizzardX]

Dell R710 with tons of ram, two decent CPUs, Dell H700 in hardware raid. If you're using SSDs get the 2.5" hotswap chassis rather than the 3.5" as that will require spacers to fit the SSDs in.

Run whichever VM host os you want; it has four NICs built in so can provide failover; also has 4 PCI-e x8 expansion slots should you require it.