Over the last two weeks, I’ve made some significant changes to my home lab.  The changes were brought about by a steadily increasing electric bill that had been increasing significantly over the last few months.

I picked up two new servers, a PowerEdge R710 and a PowerEdge R610,  on eBay that will replace the 3-node, 2U Dell DCS6005 that I had been using for my lab.  Both servers come with dual quad-core Xeon processor and 24 GB of RAM.   The R610 will be for server workloads, and the R710 will be for testing out VDI related software.

Although I end up with fewer cores and less RAM for running virtual machines, the two new servers have a few features which make them attractive for home lab use.  The include onboard power monitoring to track electricity usage, and I easily view this within the iDRAC.  The baseboard management on the DCS6005 nodes never worked right, so the new servers had iDRAC6 Enterprise modules added for improved remote management.  The new servers are far quieter than the DCS6005, and I can barely hear them once they are running. They also have more expansion slot, which will allow me to start testing GPUs with Horizon