My Lab Environment

My lab is rather modest at the moment. It consists of 2 Dell PowerEdge sc440 server’s with an intel xeon processor and 4GB’s of ram. Both the servers currently run ESXi with a mix of guests including the usual  MS 2003, 2008, and freenas (media) and openfiler Iscsi targets. The servers are powerful enough to run about 8vm’s (2k3 and xp ones) without any notable drop in performance).

All the Microsoft licences come from either evaluation versions (if I wont need the server for very long) or my technet direct subscription (absolutely essential). The Citrix licence comes from the developer edition of Xenapp which gives you a year with a 2 user allowance.

One of the servers until recently had XP installed on the bare metal which allowed me to install VMware workstation for VCP studying now I’ve passed that I have installed ESXI back onto it to aid me with whatever I choose next.

Generally I find the servers very good although I do believe that the HP ML115′s would have been better but I missed out on the extrodinarily cheap HP box bunfight that occured sometime ago.