Home Lab - Cisco UCS C240 M4 hardware walkthrough

[Music] hey what's up guys welcome to mb tech talker my name's matt so this is a little different from my past videos the reason i've not been uploading content lately is due to problems i've had in my home lab let's say i've had some technical issues and while i was getting pretty frustrated and ended up biting the bullet and buying a new server from ebay so i thought it'd be cool to share with you what i've been up to show you around the hardware that i've bought and explain how i'm going to be using it in my up and coming videos so with that being said let's geek it up so after looking around ebay and trying to work out what i wanted i ended up going for this cisco ucs c240 m4 server um the price was 385 pounds which is approximately 520 dollars it it was advertised with one intel xeon e5 2680 v3 12 core cpu with 32 gig of ram two power supply and units um a 32 gig sd card which connects direct to the motherboard known as the cisco flex flash controller this had earsex audience stored on there the guy also was advertising two one terabyte barracuda 2.5 inch sata drives installed ready to go um and yeah it came in at 385 pounds and i thought wow that's that's pretty cool that's that's a good price so i thought right that's good but i reckon i can get more out of this but i need to figure out how much it was going to cost me so i contacted the guy and said look i need another cpu um have you got one i need some more ram have you got one he was like yes i do that's great can you give me a price so he came back for an additional cpu and heatsink of 135 pounds which was approximately 180 and another 32 gig of ram for 68 pounds which was 90 so i thought right that is much better you know that's going to give me uh 24 cores with and then with the hyper thread enable that's going to give me 48 logical cores you know that is like that's mega that's a lot of compute power for a home lab so it's like right okay for 588 quid which is what 790 this is going to give me plenty of headroom to do all my labs um be able to run even g be able to put cisco viral ios images on there routers layer 2 switches everything i wanted to do so i was like right this is this is exactly what i want so i pulled the trigger and i bought it and it turned up and yeah it's mega loud i'm not gonna not gonna lie it's not something you want in your living room but it is something um that i needed something i wanted so i'm okay i can put it in a another room in a and i can access it remotely so it doesn't really bother me but this is a big investment this is something that is if you're learning new technologies you need something that's capable otherwise you're just going to get into all sorts of problems you're going to get frustrated so i thought well just going to do it once once and for all and it's just gonna give me what three or four years of um you know being able to do everything that i need to do right now so that's what i did and i'm mega happy so uh very cool if you guys are thinking about doing it definitely do it it's it's a big investment if you are starting out in your you know in your it career or you're you know getting to cisco or palo alto or fort gate or checkpoint vmware you're going to need something like this you know this is a big investment so you know if you can afford it go for it that's my advice so before i wrap up this video i'm going to give you a tour around the cisco ucs chassis using the cisco integrated management controller which is accessible using the management ip address of the cimc and is directly through a browser now you may be drawn to the older versions of the ucs so the m3 now what i'm just going to warn you about is that the cisco integrated management control software that runs on those older versions do not support html5 and they still use flash player now a lot of web browsers these days do not support that and it will cause you problems there are some workarounds but i wasn't even going to entertain it html5 is the way to go so even though the m3s are cheaper just keep that in mind so let's just log in so when you log in you are given the summary of the chassis so all the uh all the relevant information server properties the actual mandarin controller ip address etc the firmware version and also the chassis status if you go up here and click on the inventory you can go through and look at what hardware's installed here you can see the two xeon processors that gives me 24 threads i've got 64 gig of memory installed and it's got a cool little feature on here if you click on the dim location diagram actually gives you a layout of all the dimm slots available on the server and uh i've read that these can take 64 gig per slot so that would give you a massive 1.5 terabytes of memory which is just mind-blowing so that's uh that's quite cool that that diagram gives you a good idea then you can go on to the pci adapters and you can see everything that's installed the ethernet adapters the radio controllers etc i've got redundant power supplies so i've got two psu's here i've got no vic adapters then the network adapters i've got six ports um as well as the dedicated management port and then the storage adapters so if we go back over there we'll take a look at the storage so we've got this cisco flex flash so if you click on physical drives there's two slots on the motherboard i've got a slot populated with a 32 gig card at the moment this is where esxi has been installed for me this is the guy who i bought their server from already had already had this installed on there now i was having a quick look through this it looks like this has been set up as a um as a mirror says here mirror primary so i think what that means from what i understand is that if i had another sd card in this in slot 2 i could mirror that that configuration over that storage overs for redundancy so if i click on virtual drives it's called hypervisor i think this is a something you can name yourself and it's uh in a raid configuration and at the moment it's only 32 gig and it's degraded because there's only one card in that kind of raid configuration but that's quite cool i'll take a look at that see if i can put some redundancy in there then we got the actual radio controller itself i think it's yeah 16 physical drive can be installed onto here which is you know really scalable um i've got four drives cover one terabytes and a couple of two terabytes and you can go into the um the virtual drive so this is the raid configuration i haven't really settled on what raid configuration i'm going to use in this lat on this lab server at the moment i just got on raid 5. um i'm not really that fussed about redundancy on here i may go for performance because i can use my iscsi target on my trunad server so i've got i've got storage options so i'm gonna have a play with this um what else we got um yeah so that's it really you can go through the compute and and look at the bios and remote management stuff um you've got the networking um tab there and you've got the admin tab i think the only final thing i want to show is you can launch the kvm i'm going to give you a java based or html base so if i just launch this it opens up a new window and just click on this link and this is just going to give me the exact view is as if i was in front of the server with a keyboard and mouse plugged into it so this is great this is exactly what i wanted because my server is in a different location i can do everything through the web browser i'd have to keep going backwards and forwards if i want to configure anything on esxi so this is this is a really cool feature and you can bring your keyboard up and you've got tools and power there's all sorts of stuff on here so yeah this is really good so i'm really happy that this server is going to give me everything i need so yeah that's it really um just giving you an idea of what i've bought and how i'm going to use it so well i hope that's been useful um i'm going to make some more videos on this i'm going to go through the whole process of of building the server and its capability um and you know start getting onto some labs with even g and get some palo alto devices in there and using uh cisco routers and layer 2 switches etc so that i can play with some of the things i can't do in vmware workstation start using networking devices or appliances so i can do dynamic routing and all those good things so uh yeah i hope i hope you found that interesting and if you've got any questions just drop them in the uh in the comments below but thanks very much i'll see you on the next video okay guys that's it for today's video thanks for watching over the next coming weeks i will be uploading more videos where i will be sharing more content about palo alto firewall features and technologies and how to configure them if you like this video i'm sure you know what to do by now but just in case you don't please hit that like button below and share with your friends and be sure to hit that subscribe button and the bell to get notified every single time i post a new video if you have any ideas of video content you want me to create please put them in the comments below as i would love to hear your feedback on any aspect of my channel please keep watching and i will see you in the next video thanks [Music]

Channel: MB Tech Talker

Views: 116

Keywords: home lab

Id: oOuMRz8MJfQ

Length: 11min 3sec (663 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 22 2021