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Le Materiel de Laboratoire est Arrive!

...which sounds better than 700 pounds of expensive gear got dumped at the wrong loading dock on Wednesday. Hey, everything sounds better in French. As they say, the best laid plans...
We had hoped to have all of our lab gear on premise, installed and configured, by the end of September. While I grudgingly admit that may have been an overly optimistic goal, we now have all of our hardware on site and have begun to un-box and rack. Three sore backs, one borrowed backhoe, and some serious rack consolidation have us back on track for building out our Virtualization Test Lab.

Our raw parts list:

  • 6 multi-core HP servers optimized/enabled for virtualization running Intel and AMD chips
  • 2 non-VT multicore Dell boxes
  • A killer EqualLogic iSCSI SAN on loan
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  • ISCO and HP GigE switches
  • 2 vintage SunFire boxes running Solaris 10
  • APC Enclosure & KVM
  • 1 gently-used Apple Xserve

    A quick, rough count gives us more than 30 cores, ~100 Gbytes of RAM, and ~8 Tbytes of speedy storage to play with. We're going to have fun and faithful readers will benefit from our missteps, mishaps, and pratfalls as we install, configure, and run enterprise-class virtualization rigs. We hope you'll also benefit from our successes, Aha! moments, and experiential learning.

    We're already looking at circuit amp loads and a new fiber run as part of our build up. Power, BTUs, and bandwidth; sound familiar to anyone out there? While we have the benefit of a lab setting for all of our test environments, we will be facing the same real-world constraints that all of you have. We'll be keeping track of setup times, budget impacts, room temps -- the whole deal. We want this to be as real as possible, warts and all.

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