After quite a few years I have outgrown my 2 Intel NUCs and SuperMicro E200-D servers. They have served me really well through the vSphere 8 journey and when the Aria Suite was originally released proved a huge help in uplifting skills from vRA7 to vRA8. But, like all good things, they need to come to an end. They just don’t have the grunt to do what I need them to do these days so it’s time to start a-fresh!
The New Lab
Having shopped around for a while and weighing up the pro’s and con’s of multiple approaches, I decided on one thing. 1 box and no external networking. I just need to keep it simple. I don’t need a rack, I don’t need complicated switching; I just need a simple nested environment where I can use VCF 5.x and VCF9 and it’s components. The amazing Holodeck solution is a huge help in this area and enables you to deploy part or full stack VCF environments in a nested fashion. If you haven’t heard about it, get out from your cave! With this in mind, I settled on an eBay purchase. A trusty reliable HP Z840 workstation series.
The Z840 Workstation
I managed to pick up a good example on eBay in the UK for £1,892.40 delivered from Server Shopping. The specification was almost 100% what I was looking for.
| Component | Specification |
|---|---|
| Model | HP Z840 Workstation |
| Xeon CPU | 2x Intel Xeon 22-Cores E5-2699V4 2.20GHz 55M Cache 9.6 GT/s ( 44 Cores Total ) |
| Memory | 512GB DDR4 – 16x32GB DDR4 ( UPGRADE POSSIBLE to 1TB DDR4 ) |
| Drive Capacity | 2TB M.2 NVME SSD PCIE upto 3500MB/s |
| Graphics | NVIDIA Quadro K5200 8GB GDDR5 256 bit Graphics ( 2x DVI, 2x DisplayPort 1.2 ) |
| PSU | 1125 Watt 88% efficient |
| Networking | Dual integrated Intel Gigabit Ethernet included |
| Ports | 10 USB (across front and rear), audio, serial |
To the above baseline specification I then added the following
| Component | Specification | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| 4 x 500GB & caddies | Western Digital Blue SSD | HDs Surplus from previous projects, caddies £36.80 inc shipping from eBay |
| HP Z Turbo Drive Quad Card | Including 2 x 512GB NVME M2 | £138.91 inc shipping from eBay |
| 1 x 2TB NVME (add to the quad card above) | Samsung 990 EVO Plus, 2TB, PCIe 4.0 x4 / 5.0 x2, NVMe2.0 (up to 7250 MB/s), NVMe M.2 (2280), Internal Solid State Drive (SSD), MZ-V9S2T0BW | £180.48 inc shipping from Amazon |
So far, running VCF nested is not stressing the server at all and I haven’t had any significant problems (a few with Holodeck that are noted on the GIT issue tracker) – disclaimer, the usage data below is during deployment. Post deployment, CPU was around 40%, memory around 50% consumed.
So, would I recommend the HP 840 for a nested VCF environment? Yes I would! And yes, you can deploy VCF in evaluation mode for testing purposes with Holodeck!
All in, I scraped in just under £2,500 in terms of budget. And best of all, the unit is sitting under my desk – hardly makes a noise!
