This will be the first part of a multi-part series about building an extremely versatile lab which you can use to help you in your studies, learn new things or just mess about with IT in general. This part will focus on server hardware. If you are reading this, I am assuming that you have at least a very basic knowledge of servers in general and what they do.
There are many forms a server can take. You can have rack mountable servers, tower servers and blades. Starting with rack servers, the standard unit of measurement is the Rack Unit, or U. 1 U is roughly equal to 4.45cm. The most common sizes are 1-4 U.
The 1 U Server - These servers are often used for very dense virtualization, a topic we will get into in later parts. They often have support for 1 or 2 CPUs, 2-6 hard drives, depending on the type of drive, and loads of RAM. The enemy of any electronic device is heat. With this form factor, they generate loads of heat are difficult to cool, so they would use several very powerful fans. This equates to loads of noise because a smaller fan needs to spin at a much faster speed to push the same amount of air as a larger fan, such as those which would be found in larger servers. This means that they would not exactly be ideal for a home lab environment, where the servers would often be dangerously close to living quarters. While they are relatively cheap on auction sites such as eBay, don't make the same mistake I did and get one to test on, because it will drive you insane faster than a Katy Perry album on full blast during your quiet time.
3 and 4 U Servers - These servers are the complete opposite to 1 U servers. You can hand build them to your own specification, unlike the 1 U servers which you can't upgrade / repair all too easily. You can just grab a 3 or 4 U server case off of Newegg or Amazon and basically build a regular PC in it or get server grade parts. These have the ability of holding up to 24 3.5" drives or 48 2.5" drives, which is a massive storage capacity. They can potentially hold terabytes of RAM and up to 4 processors. If you're in for building a storage server, you can even get a StoragePod which can hold 45 or 60 drives, which is actually what the BackBlaze datacenter is full of. They can be as quiet as you like, since you can use 140mm fans, which are generally even quiet enough to have in the same room as you. This is ideal for people who don't have a room to dedicate to their lab or a particularly large budget since the cases are pretty cheap even new and you can use consumer-grade hardware because of the form factor. If you decide to go with a 4 U from a company like Dell, expect a barebones model to run at least 2 grand, with the one pictured above costing 4 grand.
2 U Servers - The reason I have neglected to mention these fine marvels of engineering earlier is that I feel that they are the ideal beasts for a home lab. They can hold some really powerful hardware, loads of storage and are relatively quiet if you go for more modern servers since they are pretty power efficient and have larger fans than 1 U servers. I feel they are a great balance between the outrageously loud and power hungry 1 U and the large, possibly very expensive 4 U servers. These servers, just like most of the others, feature multiple, redundant, hot-swappable power supplies so you can have a whole PSU fail and the server never goes down. You can replace it on the fly and you're back in action.
That's it for this section folks, once you've chosen your server, you need to get them hooked up and install software, all of which will be covered in the next section. As usual, if you liked this post and want more feel free to +1 and share this post to get it out there for many others to enjoy.
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