So we're having the house completely rewired and I'm having some 5e run in at the same time.
It's going to be the backbone for a variety of devices including laptops, PC's, TV's etc via a Cisco PoE switch. It'll all be fairly overkill but it's as much for my own enjoyment as anything else. I like to dabble with things I don't understand
At the moment I have a little HP microserver running Windows Server but I'd like to play with some nicer toys and have something a little more responsive to run the house.
I've been looking on ebay/forums/elsewhere and Dell Poweredge servers seem to come up rather cheaply. Looks of dual xeons with 16gig+ RAM etc. Chuck it in a small 6U rack under the stairs and forget.
Ideally, I'd like to ESXi and have a couple of virtual machines running so I can split the gaming/TV/simulation without worrying about having to look after them. Just burn and rebuild if I cock it up so to speak.
Really my questions are around which model to get and mandatory requirements if any.
- Would the 2950 be a cheaper viable alternative?
- Should I only look at the R* range? (R710 etc)
- Is there anything I should ensure I get with it? Raid cards, DRAC etc
and the most confusing part of all so far, with regards to the SAS backplane, are interposer boards really required to run SATA drives? I'd like to fill the machine with 2TB drives for storage (I'm aware of the 2TB limitation) but different websites are saying interposer boards adjust voltages/channels for the SAS interface and some say it works fine without.
Thanks,
Ross