I'm moving that way, I'm just having a few issues with no USB input when I put esxi on my gaming rig as well as a few other drivers.. as soon as I crack that one, I'm going to be golden.
Whats on your Home Server
- Thread starter liamcrane
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I'm moving that way, I'm just having a few issues with no USB input when I put esxi on my gaming rig as well as a few other drivers.. as soon as I crack that one, I'm going to be golden.
I'm moving that way, I'm just having a few issues with no USB input when I put esxi on my gaming rig as well as a few other drivers.. as soon as I crack that one, I'm going to be golden.
USB over IP, look at another thread on this page that I've commented on... Someone has used a rpi2 to do this...
Sorry gents, I just ment that mines a driver issue on the ESXi image that I'm havin to try a number of drivers to get everything working.
I get USB to work but lose the storage adaptors.. I get those to work and lose USB..
Grr.. Nightmare at times but I've not given up just yet, just need more time to look at it.
I get USB to work but lose the storage adaptors.. I get those to work and lose USB..
Grr.. Nightmare at times but I've not given up just yet, just need more time to look at it.
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I have no idea what any of you are talking about...
I'm going to back out of the thread now!!
I'm going to back out of the thread now!!
I'm running a Supermicro 836A-R1200B with 2 x 1200W PSU's
Motherboard - X7DWN+
CPU's - 2 x 3.2Ghz Quad Core 5400's
RAM - 64GB PC2-5300F
IPMI - Supermicro IPMI 2.0 card
RAID - LSI 9260-8i SAS
HDD's - 6 x SATA 6Gbps 3TB Toshiba in RAID 6 (Data Storage)
HDD's - 2 x 750GB SATA 300 in RAID 0 (ESXi Datastores)
OS - ESXi 6.0 with vCenter 6 vCSA
I've got about 26 VM's on there. Ranging from 2012 R2 DC's, SCCM 2012 R2, Exchange 2013, EFA Mail appliance, 2012 R2 Web Server, File Server, GNS3 Lab, SQL 2014, Backup Server (Veeam Backup & Replication) which backs up VM's to a dedicated NAS. Everything else is uploaded to Crashplan.
Citrix XenDesktop 7.6 and PVS covers quite a few VM's along with a Netscaler VPX.
Alerting setup through a great Android app (http://www.infradog.com/) and I may throw in a Zenoss Core VM at some point.
I've got Pfsense 2.3 running on an ALIX 2C2, however I may virtualise this at some point.
That's it.. I think.
Motherboard - X7DWN+
CPU's - 2 x 3.2Ghz Quad Core 5400's
RAM - 64GB PC2-5300F
IPMI - Supermicro IPMI 2.0 card
RAID - LSI 9260-8i SAS
HDD's - 6 x SATA 6Gbps 3TB Toshiba in RAID 6 (Data Storage)
HDD's - 2 x 750GB SATA 300 in RAID 0 (ESXi Datastores)
OS - ESXi 6.0 with vCenter 6 vCSA
I've got about 26 VM's on there. Ranging from 2012 R2 DC's, SCCM 2012 R2, Exchange 2013, EFA Mail appliance, 2012 R2 Web Server, File Server, GNS3 Lab, SQL 2014, Backup Server (Veeam Backup & Replication) which backs up VM's to a dedicated NAS. Everything else is uploaded to Crashplan.
Citrix XenDesktop 7.6 and PVS covers quite a few VM's along with a Netscaler VPX.
Alerting setup through a great Android app (http://www.infradog.com/) and I may throw in a Zenoss Core VM at some point.
I've got Pfsense 2.3 running on an ALIX 2C2, however I may virtualise this at some point.
That's it.. I think.
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How are you dealing with your spam and mail filtering in your setup? Do you use a 3rd party for this?
Thanks for that - will have a read.
You guys must have some money to pay for all this licensing 
I know a few of you use Exchange for lab stuff (like myself) but for people that actually use it properly with your family, why don't you use O365? Not flaming or anything, just interested that's all
Having to support AD/Exchange every day, supporting it at home would do my nut in!
I know a few of you use Exchange for lab stuff (like myself) but for people that actually use it properly with your family, why don't you use O365? Not flaming or anything, just interested that's all
Having to support AD/Exchange every day, supporting it at home would do my nut in!
You guys must have some money to pay for all this licensing
I know a few of you use Exchange for lab stuff (like myself) but for people that actually use it properly with your family, why don't you use O365? Not flaming or anything, just interested that's all
Having to support AD/Exchange every day, supporting it at home would do my nut in!
The advantage of VMs, rebuild when the time limits expire
I've paid for my main Server OS as that is never rebuilt, but everything else runs on trials with multiple VMs to allow redundancy as trials expire.I use exchange as the cost for my family per month to use O365 in NZ exceeds power, ssl certificate purchases... The hardware I secure second hand and generally doesn't need much in the way of CPU power, most of my gear is now LGA 1366 as that is coming of lease these days.
I also do it as I find it interesting and enjoy tinkering.. I don't do this at all for my job (I'm a civil engineer) so this doesn't seem a chore to me.
With regards to using trials etc do you have to re-download a fresh ISO or can you just use the same one? Have not downloaded a trial for a while so wasn't sure if they came with keys etc. A snapshot in hyper v could save some time to I guess for rolling back....
The trial is a seperate ISO fixed for a trial, so everytime I redo a server 2012 r2 install, it is using the same iso that just activates as a 180 day trial.
You can't use snapshots as it relies on dates and obviously the date iwll have passed if you use an older snapshot.. I've got fast internet and unlimited downloads so updating the os to latest is easy for me, otherwise I'd use WSUS.
Now exchange has a 120 day limit, but from what I've read it only complains to the admin account if you exceed that limit, no functionality is lost, unlike the OS itself.
You can't use snapshots as it relies on dates and obviously the date iwll have passed if you use an older snapshot.. I've got fast internet and unlimited downloads so updating the os to latest is easy for me, otherwise I'd use WSUS.
Now exchange has a 120 day limit, but from what I've read it only complains to the admin account if you exceed that limit, no functionality is lost, unlike the OS itself.
Afternoon everyone. Think I'm going to get a Lenovo ThinkServer at some point next week for lab use, for the money after cashback it looks like a pretty good deal; Xeon CPU, 1TB HDD etc.
For my MCSA in Server 2012 what would people recommend for a good first time lab setup? My thinking was something like this
Domain Controller - handles DHCP,DNS, AD
Application Server (Core) - Deal with file storage, WDS, WSUS
Application Server (GUI) - Same as above but to help get an understanding of Powershell
Windows 7/8 test machine, to test out GPOs etc
RRAS/NAT server
So what's the best solution? Get an SSD, install Server 2012 R2 on that and then create the above servers (all Server 2012R2) in Hyper-V? And what exactly could I do with the 1TB HDD? Split it between each VM or something?
Again, I read so much stuff it gets kinda confusing, so apologies if it sounds so n00bish. First time doing such a thing and don't want to do anything stupid!
For my MCSA in Server 2012 what would people recommend for a good first time lab setup? My thinking was something like this
Domain Controller - handles DHCP,DNS, AD
Application Server (Core) - Deal with file storage, WDS, WSUS
Application Server (GUI) - Same as above but to help get an understanding of Powershell
Windows 7/8 test machine, to test out GPOs etc
RRAS/NAT server
So what's the best solution? Get an SSD, install Server 2012 R2 on that and then create the above servers (all Server 2012R2) in Hyper-V? And what exactly could I do with the 1TB HDD? Split it between each VM or something?
Again, I read so much stuff it gets kinda confusing, so apologies if it sounds so n00bish. First time doing such a thing and don't want to do anything stupid!
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I have done something similar recently as I just started studying for the MCSA 2012 as well. I would advise getting an SSD of a reasonable size to store VMs on as it makes a very large difference to performance of the VMs.
I have two hosts currently and the one with the weaker CPU performs better for VMs purely because all are stored on an SSD.
The plan I had/have is to install Windows Server 2012r2 in Core with Hyper-V role installed (I have a Datacenter licence) and then spin up my VMs on top of this. Currently only have the domain controller running but I have plenty of spare space for spinning up full lab environments for testing.
If you dont have accesss to a full server licence I would look at using either core hyper-v (the free one) for the host or something like proxmox so you don't run into issues when the trial licence expires. You can then spin up what you want on top.....worry free
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If you can get 2 that would be perfect for the amount of VMs you would need. I splurged a little on my host but I struggle to fill the SSD on it with lab machines tbh.
120gb should be ok if you have other drives to store less high access things like isos etc. It will be able to store quite a few VMs if you use differencing disks. I have a 2012r2 base vhdx which takes ~10gb in core mode which I then attach differencing disks to when I need to test stuff. This way you can spin around 6-7 VMs inside 120gb easy.