Lab Server Build

3-minute read

I knew that I would need to build a lab of my own. I used my lab extensively in TAC and knew I would benefit having my own environment to test new features, customer questions, and help colleagues. In addition, owning the hardware would help me better feel for the hardware and VMware side of things.

By Christmas, I had finished my initial build. Thanks to virtualization, I was able to reduce my hardware footprint and used Cisco vCUBE and vCUSP for call routing. For the contact center enterprise side of the house, I had built a simplex environment with most of the added features including CCMP and ECE.

The more I used the lab and enabling more features, I started hitting performance issues. The two that pushed me to the edge and demanded more investment were CUIC and CCMP. Doing an audit of resource utilization I found that VMware was oversubscribed on memory quite a bit. I could live with for a while, but it finally got hit a point where I had to upgrade. Since I was taking the server apart, I decided to add another SSD for additional VMs coming soon.

The upgrade brought me from 500TB SSD and 64GB RAM to 1.5TB SSD and 128 GB of RAM.

Pre-upgrade utilization:

Note: CUIC is powered down in this image.

Final build:

  • CPU: Intel - Xeon E5-2620 V4 2.1GHz 8-Core Processor
  • CPU Cooler: Noctua - NH-U9DXi4 37.8 CFM CPU Cooler
  • Motherboard: ASRock - X99 Extreme4 ATX LGA2011-3 Motherboard
  • Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-2400 Memory
  • Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-2400 Memory
  • Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-2400 Memory
  • Memory: Corsair - Vengeance LPX 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-2400 Memory
  • Storage: Samsung - 850 EVO-Series 500GB 2.5” Solid State Drive
  • Storage: Samsung - 860 Evo 1TB 2.5” Solid State Drive
  • Storage: Western Digital - Red 3TB 3.5” 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive
  • Video Card: Gigabyte - GeForce 210 1GB Video Card
  • Case: Cooler Master - N400 ATX Mid Tower Case
  • Power Supply: EVGA - SuperNOVA G2 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply
  • Keyboard: Logitech - K400 Plus Wireless Mini Keyboard w/Touchpad

Note: The case is a bit bent because my standing desk got caught on the case but there was no functional impact.

Final utilization and VM list of my lab:

This was my first PC build. I have upgraded parts in the past but never built anything from scratch. Shout out to Chris for helping lay down some of the ground work.