I am using servers from nearly every single vendor inside my HomeLab/HomeDC. Except one: Fujitsu. Time to change that…. After the Stage XXX: Massive Expansion I had enough physical rack space available.
I was able to get 2 x Fujitsu RX2540M2 Server systems from a good friend for my setup.
Each of these servers are now equipped with the following components:
- 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2697A v4 2.60GHz
- 24 x 64GB DDR4-2400MHz RAM
- 1 x Fujitsu EP400i SAS Raid Controller
- 1 x IBM 5200 SAS Raid Controller
- 1 x Intel P3700 800GB NVMe PCIe
- 1 x Dual Port 10GbE Emulex
- 1 x Dual Port 40GbE Mellanox
- 1 x Nvidia P4 GPU
- 1 x IBM 200GB Enterprise SSDs for ESXi
- 4 x SanDisk 2TB Enterprise SSDs for vSAN
- 1 x HGST 900GB Write Intensive Enterprise SSDs for Cohesity
Yes, each server has 1,5TB of RAM 🙂
It fits perfectly inside my new IBM Enterprise rack from the previous Stage:
24 x 64GB DDR4-2400 memory per machine is really nice and no longer is memory my bottleneck….
The servers came only with one SAS backplane, so I retrofitted a second one, which was really hard to find…..
The second retrofit was the Dual Port LoM 10GbE-T card. I wanted 10GbE for the VMs and 40GbE for vMotion and vSAN.
You might wonder why there are two LSI SAS Raid Controllers installed? I wanted complete separation of vSAN vs Non-vSAN SSDs. The Fujitsu Controller is used for the Boot ESXi SSD, as well as for a Raid0 Config of the 900GB Write Intensive SSDs.
The IBM ServeRaid 5200 Controller with Cache and BBU is only used for the vSAN Capacity SSDs, the Intel P3700 NVMe is used for the vSAN Cache tier.
ESXi Installation was done without any problems, Boot time is a different story with these beasts…..
The first time within my entire HomeLab journey, where I got enough resources….. My first thoughts……
As you already might expect: NO, you will NEVER have enough resources in your HomeLab/HomeDC. I will talk about that later
This is now my primary working cluster, after migration of all VMs I am pretty happy with the new systems and my entire setup.
Stay tuned for the next episodes of my journey. Stage XXXII: Workstation Upgrade again
#HomeLabKing