{"id":486,"date":"2011-09-05T22:46:07","date_gmt":"2011-09-05T22:46:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/?p=486"},"modified":"2011-12-02T21:34:16","modified_gmt":"2011-12-02T21:34:16","slug":"the-ultimate-portable-lab-part1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/?p=486","title":{"rendered":"The Ultimate Portable Lab part1"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year I delivered several Veeam training workshops at the Dutch VMUG. Dell kindly donated a server to run our labs off but the problem was it was one noisy beast. And we couldn\u2019t work out how to deploy the agent in ESX that controls the fans (no help from Dell either). I want to start delivering these workshops more often and the Dutch VMUG is coming around soon, so I went about planning building our own portable lab.\u00a0 Now this is nothing new I hear you say but I thought it might be interesting to blog the build as I\u2019m planning to build some small but powerful units.<\/p>\n

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I knew if I was going to build it small enough I would have to use a MicroATX motherboard and this was what I stumbled upon.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>http:\/\/www.asus.com\/Motherboards\/Intel_Socket_1366\/Rampage_III_GENE\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Now the thing I liked about this board was that it had 6 memory sockets which is rare for MicroATX. Which meant I could get 24GB ram (6 x 4GB DDR3) on it. Now I always had it in the back of my head that I was going to go down the vTardis route and use an SSD drive to beef up the Vmkernel swapping speed and over allocate to the max. So I found what seems a pretty fast SSD from Corsair. \u00a0And I wanted tons of CPU cores so I went for Core i7 950 Bloomfield < 4 cores with HT = 8 cores. For the main storage I went for a 7200rpm 2TB SATA disk.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll give add a kit list at the end of this blog.<\/p>\n

So let\u2019s walk though how I build it.<\/p>\n

First unpacked my eCube portable MicroATX cases:<\/p>\n

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Remove the motherboard tray and attached the motherboard:<\/p>\n

Add the 6 sticks of memory and CPU, Graphics card and dual Intel Nic:<\/p>\n

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Slotted the motherboard tray back into the case and attached the case-2-motherboard cables:<\/p>\n

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Attached and cabled the SSD drive and the SATA disk:<\/p>\n

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Then wired in the PSU:<\/p>\n

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Put the lids back on and I\u2019m ready to go:<\/p>\n

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So what I got here is twin sisters with the following spec:<\/p>\n