Dell R710

Recently, I purchased a Dell R710 (specs are available here) from TechMikeNY. My intent is to use it for virtualization within my Cisco lab. I will be running a variety of VM's on it, such as: APIC-EM, VIRL, ISE, and a variety of Ubuntu Servers to provide specific services within the lab environment.

TRIALS:

11 August, 2017:

• Received the beast from the UPS delivery dude
• Packaging looks good
• Unpacked, everything is there, and even some swag from TechMikeNY! (2 logo'd pens and a phone battery bank)
• Plugged everything up
• Powered on, things looking good so far...
• AND... PCIe training error - RAID (basically, the motherboard cannot talk to the RAID controller (H700) BOOT PROCESS HALTED
• Much gnashing of teeth, and NUMEROUS reseating of H700, PCIe riser, and H700 RAM/Battery module), woot! I got it to work...
• Configured RAID
• Initialized Drives (a few hours for those of you who have never done it)
• reboot, install Xubuntu, and reboot
• AND... PCIe training error - RAID AGAIN!
• At this point, gave up. will seek replacement H700 from vendor (hopefully it is not the riser, or the motherboard)

14 August, 2017:

• Contacted vendor.. and they are sending me another H700 and requesting the original be sent back. Excellent customer service
• More to follow when new replacement H700 gets here

TRIBULATIONS:

Nothing yet, but the trials are enough.

VIRTUALIZATION:

While most home-labbers would load the free license of VMWare's ESXi hypervisor on it and call it good. Unfortunately, there is a limitation with this license that causes me some difficulty. The free license allows for a maximum 8 vCPU's per VM. This is not going to work for me. VIRL by itself, depending on the size of the architecture and type of nodes, can be very CPU hungry. Here is a calculator for estimating the amount of RAM and vCPU's VIRL will need. While VIRL will run 5 IOSv's, 5 IOSvL2's, 5 CSR1000v's, and 5 ASAv's with supposedly 7 cores, it can be REALLY slow (of course, I find VIRL over-all to be slow).

My solution? Xubuntu and VMWare Workstation. VMWare Workstation Pro does NOT have a limit on vCPU's per VM. It just so happens I have 2 licenses of VMWare Workstation PRO v12. This works out really well for me. I can use Workstation on my main computer to control shared VM's that are hosted on the R710's copy of Workstation. As an added bonus, for those of you who do not know, Xubuntu is VERY lightweight and barely uses any resources. If necessary, I can even disable the GUI on the server, and Workstation will still be accessible on it, remotely. You do not even need to login and start the hypervisor, bonus!