Now that I made my choice (good or bad only the future will tell) on my previous post and you can read all about it here it’s time to start the hunt for the hardware. At the end of the post, I’ll have the components list and the prices for each.
Because I want to keep the lab build the most budget effective as possible my main “shop” will be eBay 😀
First things first, the motherboard. After talking with some colleagues and doing some research I decided to go for the SUPERMICRO X9DRi-LN4F+ mainly because it’s dual CPU, can go up to 1.5TB of RAM, has IPMI and supports vShpere 6.7U3. eBay was kind enough to provide me with a seller for this board with two passive coolers.
Now that I have the motherboard selected it’s time for the CPUs. I wanted to get some Intel Xeon E5 V2 Low Voltage version. A quick search on eBay led me to the E5-2650L v2 10Cores 1.7GHz, more than enough for what I need. And because I wanted to fill the sockets I bought two (the seller was selling a pack)
Time for the memory. Again Low Voltage one and preferably one of the ones from the compatibility list. Sk Hynix PC3L-10600R DDR3 1333MHz, ECC, HMT42GR7MFR4A-H9 was the ones I went for mainly because of value. I got 16 modules of 16GB (256GB) at a very nice price, at least I think it was.
So, the main components are already bought, nice job!!! Now the missing parts 🙂
For disks, I selected the WD Blue 3D SSD 500GB mainly because my local shop had a nice sale on them, got 2 (1TB SSD)
Because I’ll install this board on a “normal” ATX case, mainly because of noise reduction I had to select a power supply that would fit this case and because I didn’t want to get short, I got one Zalman ZM1000-GVM – 1000W and now I realize it’s bit overkill.
And now the thing that took the longest to find, the case. Because this board does not have a regular size EE-ATX (Enhanced Extended ATX) I was not able to find a “normal” desktop case that could hold this board and had without any tweaking. After researching for quite some time I went for the Corsair Carbide Quiet Air 740 High Airflow, it was a low noise, high airflow case and it could hold the EE-ATX, had to do some extra holes but all fits quite nice.
So, to sum it all up here is the list of the components I bought
Motherboard: SUPERMICRO X9DRi-LN4F+ Server Motherboard LGA 2011 +2 HEATSINKS – 243EUROS
CPU: Set of 2x Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-2650L v2 25M Cache, 1.70 GHz – 90EUROS
RAM: 256GB Sk Hynix (16x16GB), 2Rx4 PC3L-10600R DDR3 1333MHz, ECC, HMT42GR7MFR4A-H9 – 223EUROS
Disk: x2 WD Blue 3D SSD NAND 500GB – 2*65,5 = 131EUROS
Power Supply: Zalman ZM1000-GVM – 1000W – 116EUROS
Case: Corsair Carbide Quiet Air 740 High Airflow – 132EUROS
In the end, everything was around 935EUROS
Considering that I have “enough hardware” for the upcoming years the price it’s not that high.
I hope I was able to make some light to some of you.
Next post I’ll show the assembly process and the fist my logical setup of the Lab itself.
As always,
Have fun and KISS
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