Some Rackmounts

Thanks Shakeel for the 6 rackmounts. Now to start setting up Gilgamech's Networks.

Here you can see me configuring just one of them. Each rackmount is a full datacenter server, and requires 1 power cable with ~6 amps, along with 2-3 network connections, good ventilation & noise-proof walls. Ideally, these would be powered by 240v 3-phase electricity, but the power supply can convert standard 110 wall voltage at a higher rate. The high-throughput fans inside are literally jet-engine loud. Under the hood is a dual-Opteron 2.4ghz motherboard with 8gb of RAM and a single 73GB server HDD.

Being as these are Sun Microsystems rackmounts, they were probably designed to run high-performance Solaris installations. Since they use the same x86 CPUs as most computing equipment, they should run Server 2008 R2 just fine.

My apartment is obviously underequipped to run these full-time, but I'm hoping that I can keep at least 2-3 operational. Each one should be able to host 4-6 virtual servers, and 12-18 servers is definitely enough to create a tiny datacenter, complete with Active Directory, DNS, and WSUS, along with possibly an Exchange install, some IIS, and a SQL cluster or 2.

The extra network connections are used for Integrated Lights Out, a way of checking out a server's hardware from far away. I'm still connecting to this server and learning about Sun's ILO, but I'm confident that it's only trivially different from HP's ILO, which I've used elsewhere.