Is it worth using old hardware for home lab use?

I

incremental

New Member
Jul 22, 2014
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Lets say power is not a concern and I can pick up a system with the following specs for about $350 USD. Is it worth it for running up to 6 VMs simultaneously and occassional bursts of heavy CPU and RAM use for days)? Should I go with something more modern with consumer specs that will fit my budget?

I guess I am just trying to understand what is better for virtualization:
- 2 slower quad cores vs. 1 faster quad core, and
- 24 Gb DDR2 ECC vs. less ram but DDR3 (ie. 8GB to 12GB)

Dell PowerEdge 2900 Tower Server:
2x physical Intel Xeon X5355 Quad Core 2.66Ghz processors with 8Mb L2 Cache (8 cores) including VT-X
24Gig DDR2 PC5300 ECC FB RAM
1Tb 7.2K Hard Drives (8 bays that will be upgraded short term in RAID 5 or 1+0 configuration)
Dell PERC 5i RAID Controller 256Mb Cache
2 X Gigabit Network and 2 X Redundant Power Supplies
 
I had one of those, it sucked power.

Depending on how heavy your Vm load is, I'd say look into a white box you can build with a modern I7 and some decent ram. It won't have the server level ram, but it also will be much more efficient.

Doubt you'll get it for $350 bucks, but the power will help on the pay off.
 
1nerdyguy said:
I had one of those, it sucked power.

Depending on how heavy your Vm load is, I'd say look into a white box you can build with a modern I7 and some decent ram. It won't have the server level ram, but it also will be much more efficient.

Doubt you'll get it for $350 bucks, but the power will help on the pay off.
Click to expand...

And I just saw the "power is not an issue" part. that'll do ok, bump up the ram and some faster disks and it'll be nice.
 
Thank you for the feedback e100 and 1nerdyguy.

Can anyone else provide some feedback on what configuration is recommended?
 
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