About that Dell C6100. It's on hold permanently. There were a number of problems that didn't have easy solutions and I needed to get on with my VCP6-DCV studies.
First problem was noise. Because the C6100 is four servers crammed into one 2U package and you can stuff it with 28 HDDs there is a great need for cooling which means fans which means noise. I mean a lot of noise. Like freakishly loud. Not your normal 1U or 2U rack server noise. Worse. It was bad enough that I put it in a separate room and ran cables through the wall. Even on the other side of the wall the C6100 is very loud. I live in an high-rise apartment which means there is no basement option.
Second problem is lack of native support for ESXi 6.0. I did find an article on adding the necessary drivers ... blah, blah, blah. Even though it might make for a good exercise I didn't want to spend a lot of time on this.
Third problem was capacity. RAM and CPU were fine, but I made the mistake of cheaping out on the HDDs. My original idea was to use VSAN as the C6100 does not have RAID, only JBOD (just a bunch of disks). I didn't feel like buying more disks.
My solution was to to purchase a couple of HP ProLiant DL360e Gen8 servers, each with 2 x Intel E5-2430L, 96 GB RAM, 3 x 1.2 GB SAS 10kRPM HDDs. This included RAID and iLO Advanced (allows graphics mode via out of band management interface). I was fortunate that a local reseller of used computer equipment had a shipment of these units. A special shout-out to Micropeer.
The result is that I have been able to get further faster in setting up my vSphere lab. Because the DL360e Gen 8 supports ESXi 6.0 the install was easy with the bonus that ESXi 6.0 includes ESXi 6 as a guest OS which makes nesting ESXi easier.
So now I have a vSphere lab that will not make me deaf or go insane. More details in another post.
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