Quiet down your homelab!

Posted By on Nov 19, 2014

Hey all – some of you following my blog might already know that I have a few different Dell PowerConnect switches I use for communication on my home network.  I’ve been using a Dell PowerConnect 5424 that replaced my PowerConnect 2724 (the 2724 didn’t support 802.3ad or SNMP, amongst other things).  While the 5424 performed great and supported LAGs for my NAS, it had only a couple open ports remaining and was quite...

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Going International!

Posted By on Nov 5, 2014

A bit tongue-in-cheek but semi accurate. I’ve recently picked up a new server and it’s in Canada.  The part about it being outside of the US is purely coincidental, but its worth posting about for a couple reasons.  As anyone who follows me knows, I have a decent “home lab”/small business VMware ESXi cluster going.  It’s comprised of (2) Dell 2950 w/ dual Xeon E5450 (one 2950 is a spare that is only...

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Dusty ol’ Pro/1000 VT

Posted By on Nov 3, 2014

So in an effort to increase throughput on my ESXi hosts I’ve picked up a few of these Intel Pro/1000 VT quad port adapters.  I am going to throw them in my desktop temporarily to make sure that they work and install properly, but I noticed something funny on this adapter: Something tells me port #3 wasn’t used very much – LOL So, here’s hoping it works!  I will give an update once I have them installed and...

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Slight improvements – Network and server upgrades

Posted By on Sep 21, 2014

I’ve had my test/personal VMware ESXi setup running for a bit now on my Dell PowerEdge 2950 III with the upgraded Xeon 5450 CPUs (originally came with E5405) resulting in dual quad-core Xeons at 3.0GHz.  It’s pretty snappy especially for how little I spent on it.  However, everyone knows you can’t really mess with much in VMware without memory.  So, I’ve replaced the 8GB (2GB x 4) of RAM that the system arrived...

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