Warning: this post contains copious amounts of impenetrable technobabble; read at your own risk.
It’s been a while since I’ve started a project, so of course that means it’s time. As it stands, my r720 is getting a bit long in the tooth and R730s are now the same price I paid for that system. So to Lab Gopher I went in search of a great deal. For anyone who is looking for a server, that is seriously the best thing I’ve found for sorting through all the eBay cruft.
Ever since my previous foray into building a server, I’v been trolling Lab Gopher for an upgrade. My preference would have been for a Dell PowerEdge R720xd 3.5-inch format since it could hold 12 full-size hard disks. But those are relatively rare and deals were scarce.
Instead, I stumbled across a Dell PowerEdge R720 2.5-inch format with an additional drive cage. So while 2.5-inch drives were lower capacity, I could use 16 of them if necessary.
To support more of my tinkering in an effort to test various Postgres cluster configurations, I decided it would be really nifty to have a virtual server. I could not only spin up VMs and containers to validate architectures, but experiment to my heart’s content with other potential technologies.
At first, I was going to buy an Antsle. But the fact such a thing existed made me wonder what other kinds of dedicated virtual device hardware might exist.
