My lab server gets a much needed refresh.

I have made a couple of updates to my lab server at home. First I changed to a little newer board adding features such as faster on-board video with dedicated SidePort memory allowing me to take out the dedicated card which is putting off a lot of heat. The board I chose was the ECS A890GXM-A2 which was a solid board in bench testing and also brings USB3.0 and SATA III to my server. Second I upgraded the HighPoint RAID card to a RocketRaid 2310 card with an X4 PCIe interface for faster data transfer speeds. Last I added a Bigfoot Networks Killer 2100 PCIe network card bringing my NICs to a total of 4 for additional VM’s

This was done to get me up to date and allow me to run a total of three Virtual Machine hosts for my labs and testing.

Let me know what you think about the new setup.

Specs:

• CPU: AMD Phenom II X4 910e (Only 65w TDP)
• CPU Cooler: Thermaltake ISGC-400 Low Profile
• Motherboard: ECS A890GXM-A2 ATX Motherboard
• Memory: 8GB (2GB x 4) Mushkin DDR3-1600MHz 8-8-8-24
• Video: Onboard AMD Radeon HD 4200 Video
• RAID Controller: HighPoint RocketRaid 2310 PCIe x4 4-Port (RAID-5)
• Hard Drives:
  1. 1x Seagate 7200.11 750GB (Main)
  2. 3x Western Digital 6400AAKS (RAID-5)
• Network Cards:
  1. 1x Netgear GA311 Gigabit PCI card
  2. 1x Bigfoot Networks Killer 2100 Gigabit PCIe card
• Case: Norco RPC-4020 4U Rack Case
• Power Supply: Antec EarthWatts 500W
• Primary OS: Windows Server 2008 R2 64-bit (VM Host/File Server)
• Virtual Machine OS’s:
  1. Server 2008 R2 (SonicWALL Viewpoint Server)
  2. Server 2008 (AD/LDAP Server)
  3. Ubuntu 10.10 (Web/File Server)