How I determine which Servers to buy for my home lab

how's it going everybody in this video I'm gonna go ahead and give everybody kind of a high-level overview as to how I go about spec'ing out hardware for my labs specifically the servers because I get a lot of questions on that I've really wanted to try to provide some concise specifics you know on target answers for you guys to help you understand you know how I go about choosing a particular server you know what CP you don't am I looking at how much RAM am I looking at what does the storage gonna come into play licensing why I choose ESXi versus hyper-v or you know doing some sort of a bare-metal install with eve and stuff like that so let's get started so what we're gonna take a look at in this video is specifically the servers so I'm not really gonna focus on anything else I'll talk about labs and how I go about that in a different video but I'm actually to show you my oldest server first just so you have an idea of what's going on and stuff like that now I originally was looking up servers this is probably going back now seven eight years ago and one of the first things that I did and I didn't really know how to buy a server be completely honest with you there was some trial and error stuff and I realized that everybody didn't know what I was looking at and it wasn't it was only because the fact that I had somewhat of a basic systems engineering a foundation that really helped me understand what I needed to have and stuff like that in order to make whatever I was doing successful so why does that matter well it matters because if you are trying to build a home lab I chose to go home lab versus trying to do like rack rentals or pope upload something to the cloud like in an Amazon or Azure or something like that only cuz the fact that it was at the time I was using ia me a lot for their stole em for you know security and routing and switching so minor datacenter training and I've needed something to like to live all the stuff up with initially so very in the very beginning it was obviously packet tracer but for those of you that have been dealing with Cisco for any length of time you know the packet tracer sucks and it's once you get above a CCNA level packet tracer really doesn't have any value so I hadn't even completed my CCNA and having realizing the limitations I decided to flip over to it because I needed to I knew I needed more capabilities than what packages are had and at that point in time I was like well packet tracer stinks because now I can't go lab up these technologies because the package Fisher just isn't support those capabilities and it still does it there's a lot of things a packet tracer doesn't do so another engineer introduced me to gene is three and then I switched gears and went over to genius three one of the best decisions I ever made initially I got genius three up and running and then after a period of time I realized that there were limitations of genus three like at the time I was studying for a ccnp switch and you can't emulate at least back six seven years ago you couldn't emulate switching in genus three so I had physical switches I still have those switches they're actually down on my basement powered off because they're older thirty-five 50s 29 50s you know you spend 30 40 bucks on ebay you get some hardware you know but the cool thing about it is it gave me a lot of he made the ability to play around with the technology so and that was really important to me so with that being said I took advantage of those capabilities but fast forward another year or so I've completed my ccnp at this point and now I'm working on the CCIE and about that same point time is when VCC I ever did for flipped over to see see a version 5 and this is 2013 2014 yeah about that so by converting over I needed something to to Det beefier like my local computer just couldn't support the the amount of routers and switches that I needed so I I remember watching a INE video on an introduction to dmvpn with Brian McGann and I was like I didn't know what platform he was on what the how to get any of that stuff working so I just started asking questions just like you guys asked me and I realized you know he's just like well this is a server running on running ESXi and I run these virtual routers as virtual machines and then he talked about how you connect the routers to a V switch and I was just like so now that I have at least some understanding I just heard Google one stuff looking this up looking that up and I actually recorded a video on a long time ago so it's actually a rather popular video on my channel it's just older most people don't see it so I went through and did that I went out I bought a server now what server did I buy at the time it was a Dell C 1100 which is the same four factors Cisco UCS C 220 but the the Dell had problems it was obviously it was refurbished it was you know there were obviously most of the hardware I've got in the second-hand I buy you know what would have been a $10,000 server you know current day you know when I buy it it's two three four hundred dollars and then I just buy whatever I need to in order to build it out so currently I have three servers in my basement I have three servers that you I have are the one or the vSphere client connections that I have to my three servers and my first one it was 32 or 24 gigs of RAM and I don't remember the CPU pit has been so long I doesn't really matter the current CPU current servers that I'm working on so the one right here visit the second oldest one so I bought this one but in at a time I was working for a company that did a lot of virtualization it was a managed service provider and we had a lot of vmware boy so I was working with VMware a lot and so I'm going to say working with it that means I'm logging into V Center and I'm interacting with virtual machines when people call up and have a problem remote jumping at a remote desktop connection to a VM that was what I was doing I was just rebooting p.m. sirs don't don't get me wrong and thinking I was doing something you know cool cuz I wasn't I was doing what I needed to do in order to do my job so I learned a lot of that and what ended up happening was one of the systems engineers that worked at the company that I was working at he was passing through and I intentionally kept an eye out for him and when he passed through I popped up and I don't remember the guys name to be honest with you nice dude though I said hey I have a question for you as a DD have a couple minutes and I was actually just starting my lunch break and he's just like well I'm kind of busy at the moment can I come back in like 20 minutes of CI sure no problem and then he popped back again what's up and I said I'm I need your help what's with CPUs I don't understand CPUs and servers and you know somebody trying to do I said well trying to build a VMware server I wanted salt es6 I on a server so that I can run virtual routers inside of my server and he's just like oh okay sure no problem and you have a couple minutes I said yeah so he walked me to his desk and he pulled up vCenter at the time other thing it was for dot something because it's a long time ago and he showed me he's just like you see this stuff right here he actually because it was a different UI but since I don't have V Center I'm showing you the very similar output right here the Intel Xeon CPU X 5560 2.8 gigahertz this is licensed so I'm I finally got myself a license finally instead of having to rebuild the servers every so often this has got two physical cores and each core has four sockets I'm to physical sockets each socket has four cores and that would give me eight total course and then you hyper thread that then it gives you 16 logical processors so in theory I should be able to run 16 VMs you know one CPU per VM but I'm obviously not doing that because a lot of these servers that I'm running have multiple V CPUs so I'm actually getting rare actually rather good performance out of them because I'm not over extending the servers I've actually cleaned it up quite a bit because I was starting to run it was already here really sluggish but so let me talk to you a little bit about how this comes into play let me go ahead and pull up Firefox and talk a little bit about how I made the determination to do what I did so take this into consideration so let me go ahead and jump out of the way and in here we're just gonna go to Google Google comm so if we were to look up the server right so we have this CPU right here this right here type in Intel X 55 60 right I come in here and I don't waste any time going down to here right I go right to Intel's architecture website I click on it and then I look here so what I go do is I come down here to where it says advanced technologies advanced technologies is going to tell me all the information that I care about right this is the virtualization specification things like that so what we're looking for is down here we're looking for hyper threading technology is supported we are and if you don't know what any of that stuff is you can click on this and it will give you some information it'll tell you that delivers to processing threads per physical core highly threaded applications you get more work done in parallel completing tasks sooner so it allows you to use both CPUs at the same time instead of doing a single core or non hyper threaded where you're doing one thread at a time so they're using multiple cores so this one also has intel vt-x this one says allows one hardware platform to function as multiple virtual platforms it offers improved manageability by eliminating downtown and maintaining productivity by isolating computing activities into separate partitions again this is really important because this gives you that flexibility of running nested virtualization this basically allows a VM like Eve or the FMC Eve more specifically that's gonna have VMs running inside of it or nested virtualization to basically think of it like the VM punching a hole in itself and allowing the beams it's running inside of it so like a couple of routers or a firewall or a couple switches to be able to look through the eve platform and see through it down to the CPU itself and go oh well I know it's particular platform it is because that's what's up because that allows you to pass the information through so these are just some of the things you'll come into play if you don't know what the extended pages table this is second level address translation or slat provides acceleration for memory intensive virtualized applications reduces the memory and power overhead costs and increases battery life but we don't really have to worry about that so basically that's where the ability to carve up the memory and the CPU between the virtualization technology and the extended page tables basically allows you to carve up the physical RAM and CPU of the server and divvy it up and provide a resource reservation if you need to be and where does support that if you need to do that on a per being a basis we're not do that in my life and ever I don't care but it is an option so that's that's the CPU now if I come down here to my older one this is a CPU that's an e 73 30 so they come back over here and I pull this guy in here i type in e 73 30 and I come to the ARC website right and I come down here to advanced technologies you'll notice that hyper threading is not supported right IV TX is so I can virtualize and I can boot a VM but if I wanted to do anything advanced I wouldn't be able to so I wouldn't be a hyper threading and it says right here that hyper threading is inactive because it's not supported so I have I have four so in this case here I've got to processors to processor sockets this servers got four physical CPUs and I've got four cores per socket which means it gives me a total of sixteen so there's no sixteen as the most I can run here but this server is a workhorse I also I obviously have much more running these these pieces right here are not running very hard at all but this server is used for some other testing and stuff like that I'm doing there used to be a lot more running on it but I can run a lot on here and it works really well it's just that the experience is rather slow so I don't recommend getting this particular model CPU because it doesn't support the hyper threading it has to do with the the architecture of the platform it will you will be able to boot a VM to it right that will be supported here so you can do you can run virtual platforms so I can boot virtual machines inside of that particularly ESXi server however other advanced capabilities aren't there so let's go look at the last one this is going to be this is my UCS server and this guy right here is an e5 twenty six twenty two point two gigahertz so if we come back over here it's an Intel i5 Aoife sorry about that I forgot that if I put a dash in your pauses so this server's got all the capabilities all the bells and whistles that I needed to have and it's got a lot going on right there's several things that come into play with this that it's it is a workhorse right so I have two physical CPUs in it and then I have six cores per socket so that's 12 total CPU C 12 total logical processors with hyper-threading it doubles out of 24 so just so you understand how this works if hyper threading is enabled so if you have one CPU that's got sixteen logical cores so it's one socket 16 cores right that's that's where the chorus per socket comes into play so if you have one physical CP that CPU has 16 cores you add a second CPU with 16 cores that means you have a total of 32 cores you add hyper-threading to that that means you have 64 cores so hyper threading allows you to basically share and load balanced and double your capacity so it's very very cool how that comes into play I'll talk about that more in detail there's another server that I have on order for some work-related stuff that we're going to be putting in here that I will be showing you how some of that type of stuff works it's a much newer server lots of resources on it so that's basically how I went about doing that so let's let's shift the gear from CPU so now you know CPU you want to look for CPUs that have a hyper threading enabled and to have virtualization technology capabilities hyper training is a big deal so in other words with the hyper threading specifically there's that like if I needed to run Eve on this server and then I wanted to spin up a VM inside of it so like launch a new router then that wouldn't be supported here because the ability of passing that the nested VM to a router running a set of Eve down to the CPU here is not supported I did look it up a long time ago there is a legit issue with it so I'm like okay well I just can't run that there so it sucks but it is what it is but I can run off things on here that are just gonna be a regular VM like I can load up CSR 1000 V's here xrv I can load up firepower ASA's nexus 9 KS Windows PCs Linux pcs I can virtualize anything at the hypervisor level but if I want to do any type of nested virtualization like Eve or you know viral or anything like that where I'm I have a install an e vm and then I run routers and switches firewalls or whatever inside of that that won't work on this particular server so let's talk a little bit about the RAM so initially my servers came with 64 gigs of ram and through a combination of working with clients and their decommissioning hardware and I need to go through and you know I'm like hey since you're throwing this out anyway do you mind if I cobble together you know do you mind if I cannibalize the the server a lot of times my customers have been like you just want the server like sure I'll take it home and I loaded up in my car and I bring it home and I I take whatever I need out of it I've got three or four servers in my basement that are just from customers that I you know they they got rid of it they already took the hard drives out of it they're like there's no hard drives and I'm like okay I'll go buy a hard drive man what's that fifty bucks I can afford that so that's what I would do and the other half of it has been going on buying a memory pack where you go online you find out how much RAM is you know I would literally pull out ram and be like okay this is I pull all the specifics off the RAM stick I go look it up and find out okay how much let's say they're eight gig sticks and I want a double go from 64 to 128 that means a me go from 8 to 16 so I would order eight more sticks assuming that I have slots for it one of the major issues that I ran into was figuring out the RAM slotting that I needed to know in order to get the all of the RAM to be detected because if you just put it in any random Bank in order it'll mess things up and then sometimes it won't boot sometimes it won't recognize it so there's a lot of trial and error and I haven't really found any really good documentation on IBM servers or really Cisco servers either to figure out how do I take advantage of the RAM and things like that so a lot of trial and error on that by the finally I was able to get all of my servers to recognize 128 gigs of ram I'd had to go out and spend some money sometimes it was $250 you know the price of a firewall I spent on Ram but it's actually kind of funny since I started running even about a year and a half ago it really isn't a RAM issue anymore its CPU like I'm let's for example here I'm running a couple of Eve server and running to Eve servers here and obviously call manager Express and I've got unity and some other stuff and I am in presence they're not powered on at the moment but when they are the CPU climbs and I'm doing some security based studies as well so I'm having to deal with that but the you know running ice so taking a lot of those aspects and they did it climbs the rant or climbs the CPU so just keep that in mind as you're moving forward with your testing and things like that for storage I'm very very straightforward I went out I bought a QNAP storage appliance really really good stuff it's a unit about the size of a couple cereal boxes it's about about six inches wide about eight inches tall about a foot deep it's got three four terabyte hard drives in it and it's cool because it I can pick and choose how the hard drives are carved up so I've got one 4 terabyte drive those dedicated to nothing but sand so I've got a nice cozy target set up on it and that's where this comes into play so there's two physical gig gigabit connections so one goes into a sand switch if you will it just it's just ice cozy it's a little gigabit 8 port Netgear switch that's you know providing the connectivity between the QNAP and then the three servers and then I have the onboard data store this is where I'll use 6 I so it's just a regular non SSD hard drive so it's either like a 7200 rpm or 10,000 rpm SATA Drive you know usually I just go online I buy you know 146 Geiger's like a 72 gig or whatever size hard drive it is that's 10,000 or 15,000 rpm and just do that and it works just fine so I don't want us to Steve I don't need anything high-performing because it's a home lab but the having miss storage built out like that means I can build on ass and I understand - cuz he works and that was kind of a big deal to know how to do that that's basically my home lab that's how the physical servers are built and things like that if you have any questions leave a comment in the comment section below and I will do my best to try to answer any of those questions let's hope like that until next time guys take it easy

Channel: Rob Riker's Tech Channel

Views: 7,987

Keywords: server, lab, home, hardware, choosing, building, vmware, ibm, cisco, ucs, esxi, virtual

Id: An2shb-W5RQ

Length: 22min 28sec (1348 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 30 2020