Budget PC (server) with plenty of RAM?

zazou

I must admit that I haven't looked at the market in any detail but I see a lot of very knowledgeable people here and I hope you don't mind me asking:

What would be my options for buying a new or near new (second hand big brands off eBay) machine with the capability for plenty of memory?
I don't have a specific budget in mind but I guess sub £500 is a good starting point.
The purpose of the machine would be a server, hosting virtual machines so it the hardware must support Hyper-V and minimum 16GB of RAM (32GB preferably). It wouldn't need a fast CPU, 2nd or 3rd generation i5 should do as the VMs would only be used for educational purposes.

onomatopoeia99

Why not get something like a second hand Dell T5400 workstation from ebay with a couple of Xeons. They will take 32GB as they have 8 slots (ECC RAM though, so that's another thing to buy second hand on ebay as it's very expensive new). They can only take (easily) three hard drives though, so you may end up spindle limited. Should be do-able under £500 though nowadays, Recently I bought a dual Xeon box with 8GB (8x1) in for £175, bought 16GB of RAM (4x4GB) so ended up with 20GB installed and a big SATA drive for the images.

In total I have two of similar specs, one running VMWare ESXi (aka vSphere) and one running 2012R2 with the Hyper-V role. I found Hyper-V an exercise in frustration (I can rant about the difficulties of remote administration at some length, maybe it's better if you use AD and a domain controller) and use VMWare for all our virtualisation requirements. I only keep the Hyper-V server for compatibility testing.

zazou

Thank you for the guidance onomatopoeia99. This looks exactly what I'm talking about.

onomatopoeia99

That's better specified than either of mine, should fly along

bluesnake

be very careful for vmware and follow the requirements.

I attempted to build a VMserver (v4.1) at work (a number of years ago) and found the HP G3 cpu did have the requirements, but G4 did. So used and old G4, that either did not like the bios, network card, or controller - cant remember which, and base level was a G5.

At home, bought myself a hp server, looked if I could make it a vm one, but that too had an unrecognised raid controller.

There was a site out there which specified which white box motherboards did work, downfalls and work arounds.

zazou

That's a valid point bluesnake.

According to Intel's Ark, Xeon E5450:
Intel® Virtualization Technology (VT-x) ‡ Yes
so it should be fine for Hyper-V.

The environment would only be for academic purposes so no real stress is expected.

colin79666

RAM and Storage are going to be the bottlenecks. I'd strongly recommend SSDs if you plan to run more VMs concurrently than you have drives.

Does it have to be a PC? You can get rack mountable second hand servers for peanuts. Something like a HP DL380 G5 from eBay with 32GB ram and some hard drives can be found for under £400.

I_have_spoken

I heard some peeps boot the HP 54L micro-server with 16Gb RAM and RAID controller directly into ESX as a homelab, otherwise it's fine for Windows Server 2012