Today I bought a pair of used HP DL380 (Gen 5) rackable servers.
The bottom line is that if I bought them as a pair, I could get them for a very good, heavily discounted price.
The servers have been refurbed back to the core.
Each server comes with 2x Quad Core Xeon 2.33Ghz processors.
And each server also comes with 16GB of RAM.
So they are RAIDed, VMWare-ready, and sufficiently powered to do the kind of thing I want them to do.
Well.
Overpowered might be more accurate.
But there’s no such thing as having too much processing power, eh?
The downside is that although each server has 8 bays, neither has any disks, so I’ll have to buy those separately.
I’ve decided that I’ll buy two pairs of disks, a pair for each server.
When I’ve installed the disks, I’ll install CentOS on each server, and virtualise the platforms.
Then, as I add more disks to each server, over time, I just need to resize the virtualised environments to take advantage of the increased disk capacity.
Within the virtualised environments on each physical server, I can create a number of virtual servers (VMs).
So each physical server could host, for example, ten VMs.
A total of 20 virtual servers.
I’m really looking forward to some first-class geekage.
I’m also very excited because this is the first step down the path of a new business venture that I want to explore.