No, desktop performance was not going to cut it. Knowing myself as I do, I knew that I was not going to be satisfied by throwing a cheap NAS together out of a couple or SATA disk. I had nothing that allowed me to fail over between host. Sure I had terabytes of SAS and SATA disk, but it was all local. Once I had a deployed a couple of very nice and fully loaded ESX servers, I came to find that the performance bottleneck in my lab was storage. Let’s not even get into my networking setup… as that is a tale for a different day. Oh and tons of SSDs that were considered too small not 6 months after they were unboxed. However now I was landing quad core Nehalems (perfect for virtualization) with handfuls of memory and sexy pci-e SAS/Sata raid controllers. Previously I would have been lucky to land an old Xeon (without virtualization support) to take home, something chock full of PCI-X cards (or worse, SCSI) that were useless to me in a desktop. As I moved from one role to the next, I found that I had the pick of the litter when it came to retired equipment. I measure the time that has past since then by the amount of gray that has crept into my beard. This was very early in my career when I had a lot to learn and plenty of free time to study. A couple of desktops converted over to rack mount cases and racked in a cheap telecom rack in my unfinished basement. It all started out so innocently… An old Sun Ultra 5 to learn Sparc Solaris at home. I have a terrible, terrible addiction which is my homelab. So I am not going to lie, I am a very sick man, but I am also not afraid to admit it.
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