HPE Proliant DL360P
Acquiring a new server can be costly; however, a fantastic alternative is exploring marketplaces and auctions. Recently, I made a purchase from an online auction site in Belgium, which turned out to be an exceptional deal, especially considering the specifications it offers.
| CPU: | Intel(R) Xeon(R) E5-2630 @ 2.30GHz |
|---|---|
| RAM: | 192GB DDR3 ECC |
| HDD: | 3X HPE 450GB SAS |
| Raid: | Smart Array P420i Controller |
| NIC: | Intel 82599 10 Gigabit Ethernet Controller |
TP-Link TL-SG108E
In the future, where I aim to connect additional devices to this server, I decided to invest in an affordable TP-Link switch with VLAN capabilities. In the following sections, I will explain on how I configured this switch and utilized PFSense to effectively manage the different VLANs.
USB PCIE Expension
I had an excellent idea of using an external HDD as a storage device for my server, rather than buying SAS drives because they can be expensive. And i thought it would be an fast way to move VM's form my laptop to my server. However, I encountered a bottleneck as the server had only one available USB 2.0 slot and USB 2.0 is slow. To overcome this limitation, I purchased a USB 3.0 PCIe expansion card. I must admit that making this card work was an enormous challenge.
