The Server is here!

It's humble but we have to start somewhere

The server I ordered arrived Thursday and after re-seating the memory it came along with ESXi 5.1.

I picked up a Dell PowerEdge 2950 III Dual Quad Core server. The price was not the lowest I could find but for 450 or so dollars I had a box which came loaded with ESX which could supports 4-8 virtual machines and was shipped, via ground, within 18 hours of ordering.

I can not emphasize strongly enough what a bad idea it was to try picking up a desktop to serve as a test bench when for about 150$ less than an off the shelf desktop I have a proper server which will support 8 decent VM's. That should be more than enough to work with the configuration management tools chef and puppet.

I purchased the server through Stalion Tech. The turnaround was 4 business days and when I believed I had an issue with one of the memory sticks they were very helpful on the phone, willing to send a replace out right away if the re-seating did not work.