Today i became the proud owner of a Dell 2850.
I purchased it on adverts.ie for a whopping 250 Euro.
The server is a Dual Xeon 3.0 GhZ with 8GB RAM and 5 x 76GB 15K SCSI disks.
This will make a welcome addition to ”my ever expanding “cave”.

So far i have created the Raid as Raid 5 and installed ESXi 4.0.
I did all this through the DRAC interface which is seriously impressive.
Being able to view the console through a https interface as the machine boots gave me the giggles, being able to mount my ESXi 4 image from an ISO file across the same DRAC that made me damn proud to have helped my company achieve its EA Dell Certification only months ago. The server itself is loud, sure it’s a server, but its not too loud. I will leave it here beside me for a while to see how it handles.

*Update*

This post was sitting in my Drafts for far too long.
I’ll summarise what happened next.

Tried to install Server 2008 R2 but the Dell Perc 4 controller is “not supported”. This was a bummer so i retired the idea of using this for future proof concept testing. The server went into work to our LAB setup as it was far too loud at home. I’ve used it so far for in house Disaster Recovery testing, more on that later.

Dell 2850 · esxi · Perc 4 · server 2008 R2