Does fully populating an R710 with RAM hurt performance?
Fully-populating your R710 clocks the RAM down to 800 MHz, but how much of a difference does that really make? In this blog entry I run Geekbench 3 benchmarks to find out!
Dude you’re getting a Dell, again! My “brand new” R710!
Dude you’re getting a Dell, again! This blog entry documents the brand new Dell R710 I found on eBay and how I prep it to be a second host in my vSphere 6 cluster!
More RAM is more.
As if 72GB wasn’t a lot of RAM I’ve come across 144GB to add to my Dell R710. This will give me enough overhead that I can size VMs less conservatively!
So just how loud is a Dell R710?
Can you run your R710 on your coffee table without annoying your spouse? How about in the middle of the dining room? Read here to find out if you find the noise tolerable!
Breathing some life into my R710
I recently picked up a (a few months ago) Dell R710 in order to leverage its higher memory and CPU capacity compared to the 2950 III’s I run from time to time in my lab. I bought it with dual Xeon E5530 CPUs which are 4-core CPUs clocked at 2.4 GHz. It only came with 12GB of DDR3 RAM, however, which is a bit limiting for an ESXi host. My plan is to swap the E5530’s with E5649 (6-core, 2.53 GHz) or X5670’s (6-core,...
About Me
I am a Sr. Systems Engineer by profession and am interested in all aspects of technology. I am most interested in virtualization, storage, and enterprise hardware. I am also interested in leveraging public and private cloud technologies such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and vRealize Automation/vCloud Director. When not working with technology I enjoy building high performance cars and dabbling with photography. Thanks for checking out my blog! 
