Home Server

I am one of those IT people who has a little home server. Some time ago I decided it would be a great idea to install VMWARE ESXi on it. Basically turning it into a small data centre. At the time I could get a PowerEdge T110 from Dell with 16gb of memory pretty cheaply and it has served me well. I have some virtual Windows servers, a Solaris server and a Linux server all together.

With this kind of combination you can test new software, install different versions of Windows, check out new stuff and not affect the laptop I use day to day.

All this was good but what you can't do (easily) is run Microsoft's virtualised environment (Hyper-V) inside VMWARE ESXi. You can in theory and there a few Internet articles on the topic. Some are a little dated but mostly you end up doing unsupported processes on ESXi.

So I came to the conclusion that I needed another little home server. I begin to feel like I am building a larger data centre in my home now. I got down to some reasonably priced alternatives and settled on a HP Proliant Microserver from ServersPlus.

The two issues I had were; Would it run Windows Hyper-v virtualisation and could I stack it with 16gb of memory as it specified on most of the adverts I had seen that it only worked with 8gb.

Yes was the answer to both queries. it comes with barely 2gb of memory but you can install 16gb (8 x 2 slots). Hyper-v on Server 2012R2 didn't work out of the box but the latest firmware upgrade fixed that.

it's not going to win any speed awards but if you want a home server for educational purposes then it fits the bill.

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Powershell Symlink to Onedrive

Image
I have more than one PC. To be precise, and overly pedantic, 3 Windows 10 laptops. All are slightly different and of various ages. One I use with a Windows 10 Insider Build to keep up with the next thing coming down the pipeline. On each, I do a bit of Powershell . Powershell is the latest generation of Windows command line tools. The Linux enthusiast would look down on the Windows command line of whatever generation but Microsoft has always provided command line tools. In the early days MSDOS was a command line OS. It did little but create directories (folders), copy, move or delete files. It ran “command.com” which some said was just a basic file system manager and way of loading programs into memory. It wasn’t difficult to disagree. Developers brought out alternatives to this such as 4DOS , literally “for dos”, by JP Software . They also produced 4NT, which enhance the Windows NT command processor and 4OS2. The latter was for the IBM OS2 Operating System of the late 80s and ea
Read more

Being progressive rather than universal

Image
Microsoft was not short of ambition for its tiled interface and One Windows strategy . Microsoft was doing what no other tech firm had done - uniting mobile to desktop/laptop PCs in one experience. Apple had two OSs available - IOS for phone/tablet and OSX for its desktop/laptop users. They were different and had different interfaces. Google had two OSs - Android for phone/tablet and ChromeOS for its Chromebook devices. Of course, even One Windows doesn't mean exactly the same OS but it does mean components have such similarity that the interface appears the same to users and, with little modification, apps can run on all platforms. Unfortunately, the app platform UWP (Universal Windows Platform) was hobbled from day one. Microsoft had a poor quality application store, ever-changing developer tools and standards and a Store that only worked (on the PC side) for Windows 8 and latterly Windows 10. While people used legacy versions of Windows such as Windows 7 and XP t
Read more

Identity as the new security boundary

 Not so long ago a PC was safe behind a firewall. The idea was that the physical infrastructure of a network would be enough. Anti-virus and anti-malware products sat on PCs to protect users. Then hybrid working came along. Digital nomads who could connect to networks from anywhere. New startups had users connecting to web based applications. People were bringing their own devices, tablets, phones, projectors and so on into the workplace. Security has now started looking at people. Microsoft call this zero-trust. You don’t just trust someone because they can login. You have systems that secure identity itself. There are three steps to identity security.  1.The credentials that give you authorisation. For most people this is an account identity and password. Often the identity is an email address or some public identity. This leaves the account secured by password. The strength and complexity of the password protecting authentication. 2. Authorization is the next step. What you can a
Read more