PowerEdge T710 w/ Xeon E5530 - Need Tips on Virtualizing for Beginner

[webby88]

I picked up - for free - an older Dell PowerEdge t710 with a single Xeon E5530 and 4gb of ram (2 dimms) and it has the enterprise iDRAC6 card. It also has 8 hotswapable bays in the front, but it does not have the PERC controller.

I have been reading and poking around reading up on the various forms of virtualization and wanted to get my feet wet and try to consolidate a number of my little servers running around my home and home office.

I currently run two FreePBX installations on two different optiplex atom units, as well as an ancient PowerEdge SC440 (Pentium 4!) with Windows 2003 Server to run quickbooks and some other office apps. I also have an old linksys 4 bay nas (nss6000) and a Synology 1813 8 bay nas.

I want to add a Plex server and a zone minder server and consolidate all these other servers in the process.

I know that this server is not all that powerful, but I see that there are some serious units with dual processors and 128gb of ram available for purchase for under $400, and I wouldn't mind getting into one of those if this experiment goes well.

Any thoughts/tips/pointers that any of you veterans care to share?

edit:added zoneminder as a future server i want to add

 

[rhansen5_99]

I would look at maybe upgrading your box to dual 6 core 1366 xeons like the x5670s, maybe up the ram to support your needs.

Probably the easiest way to migrate is look for physical to virtual tools, VMware has a pretty decent tool.

Second would be to see how much memory you would need, for example in Plex each transcode will consume about 2gb, and about a CPU. I would probably leave the storage for that in your Synology but map a drive with you media to your VM. Hopefully you have gbe connection . I would use the internal disks for the VMS themselves.