It's much too late in the evening for me to be beginning a blog post. However...
Lots of cool stuff happening. I ordered my Dell T7500 system last week, along with 48GB DDR3 RAM (which turned out to be high-quality HP pulls made by Nanya, surprised me) and 2x 3.06 GHZ Quad-core Hyperthreaded Xeons, and a 512GB Crucial BX100 SSD.
That's a lot of fast for a kid like me. I've been playing with castaway systems in the corner of my room for a decade or two, playing with standing up little Linux servers for silly stuff like Mumble, basic websites, and the occasional nonprofit project.
It really boggles my mind just what's possible to purchase today with a few hundred dollars. This system can support up to 192GB triple-channel DDR3. It's got an onboard 8-port SAS RAID card. Sure, it's only got SATA 2.0 and PCIe 2.0 and USB 2.0 on board, but it has 7 expansion slots - 2 x16, 2 x8, 2 x4, and 1 x1 slot. That's a lot of expandability, ladies and gentlemen. And even current high-end enthusiast cards are barely pushing into the range where PCIe 3.0 is genuinely required.
Well, I'm seriously killing myself waiting here. I can't wait to get it all together. One pice missing is that I legitimately don't know how I'm going to connect the secondhand 28" 1920x1200 Viewsonic monitor I picke dup for $80. It's got HDMI and VGA inputs and I *think* the system I ordered has an onboard 2d workstation card with 2x DP++ ports, and the seller assured me that "it comes with all the cables you need to connect it to a monitor" - which doesn't mean jack, really. I have a VGA cable and an HDMI cable, and I hope that the adapters are either there in the box or that I can source them locally for cheap, ebcause I will NOT wait for a damned cable to ship to start playing with this rig.
So, what's my plan with the hardware?
I've been cruising on the Dreamspark website from Microsoft looking for training videos to get into Hyper-V virt. More and more companies are at least curious about implementing Hyper-V in a big way in their datacentsr and that's just going to increase later this year as Azure picks up more and more speed. So my basic plan is to get familiar with Windows Server 2012R2 Datacenter edition (I have access through Dreamspark with my alma mater, UCLA) and run some virtual workloads. I'd like to become more familiar with Active Directory and how to set up RDS for external access. I'm also super keen to get a decent last-gen video card with DX11 support (probably the Nvidia GTX 750 Ti) and try my hand at using RemoteFX with virtual desktops, especially in an attempt to make a multi-headed gaming rig that can run emulated console games.
Beyond that I also really want to try out Nutanix Community Edition and also baremetal KVM, which I have played with in the past.
And finally, I also want to configure this thing with a dual or triple-boot into Windows and Linux for gaming, again once I have a half-decent gaming card in it. I'm definitely torn on whether I can/should buy a separate SSD to run baremetal OSes on. I'm also not sure how I'm going to license a local version of Windows - for now I'm assuming I should probably try to turn either 2008R2 or 2012R2 into a workstation OS by applying desktop packages; there are entire communities out there dedicated to making gaming work on these OSes so I know it's possible.
Or maybe I'll just hustle a friend for a Windows 10 Retail SKU. Or maybe even just buy one myself *gasssppp*
Heh. Anyway it's really late here as I need to be up at 2:30am to start my shift in the UK.
Woot!
~Micah
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