How much would you spend on a test/dev server?

[doodab]

Also if you are going down the esxi route it's worth remembering the free version has a 32GB limit on physical RAM.

[stek]

Interesting, and nicely redundant w 4 PSUs, but a bit loud isn't?
Also 1700W will probably help with heating the house in the winter???

Going in shed first for shakedown then into hosting hall as part of plan B. Shouldn't be so bad re: power - have an X4240 with 16 SAS disks running - using about 400w with 5 VMs running, that has dual PSU's 850's I think...

Also got three IBM Bladecenters each with 4x2000w PSU's, with 5/6 blades running full pelt they usually suck about 800w so more hungry than the Sun but I think will all 14 blades running it was at 2800w - not that bad for 14 dual Xeon's. The intel blades are low power - the POWER ones - JS21's do like the juice....

[Boo]

less

Fewer.

Boo

[bobspud]

Interesting, and nicely redundant w 4 PSUs, but a bit loud isn't?
Also 1700W will probably help with heating the house in the winter???

I went down this route with a bunch of E4500's many years ago... cheap servers rapidly become expensive space heaters

Mine went straight to the dump as soon as I saw the leccy bill...

Have you thought about running an AWS image? just switch it on when you want it and leave the data on EBS volumes and use S3 for backups

[Sysman]

In which case either self build a desktop machine or look for a 2nd hand proper server. A basic QC box with 32GB is fairly cheap to build though personally I'd look at the 6 core i7 as they will also support 64GB RAM. You can also pick up a 2nd hand server such as HP DL380 G6 or 385 for a reasonable price though you will need to add the cost of your SSDs to that, and upgrading the RAM in the future will be relatively costly.

I got burned with the cost of upgrading RAM on an older machine.

When I first looked I didn't like the price, so content myself with filling all the memory slots with lower capacity RAM.

When I looked again a year later, I couldn't find any of the larger capacity RAM available, so I was stuck.

[DimPrawn]

Solar panels on the roof might be an idea too.

Electricity bills 'may have to rise by 25pc' to stop the lights going out - Telegraph

So £1K for the server and another £1K per year on leccy. And then the hosting option doesn't seem too bad....

[doodab]

So £1K for the server and another £1K per year on leccy. And then the hosting option doesn't seem too bad....

I'd agree you need to take the running costs into consideration when pricing this stuff up.

A vaguely modern 2 socket x86 server will pull maybe 400W going flat out and a lot less on idle, so your electricity bill is more like £350 a year (based on 14p a unit) than £1000.

You'll easily spend that much in a month renting rack space, a dedicated server, or even on EC2 (as the OP mentioned) which only makes sense if you are serious about a plan B that needs that sort of horsepower online 24x7 with "real" outgoing bandwidth and DC levels of resilience. If you don't need it then you're pissing money up the wall.

[eek]

I'd agree you need to take the running costs into consideration when pricing this stuff up.

A vaguely modern 2 socket x86 server will pull maybe 400W going flat out and a lot less on idle, so your electricity bill is more like £350 a year (based on 14p a unit) than £1000.

You'll easily spend that much in a month renting rack space, a dedicated server, or even on EC2 (as the OP mentioned) which only makes sense if you are serious about a plan B that needs that sort of horsepower online 24x7 with "real" outgoing bandwidth and DC levels of resilience. If you don't need it then you're pissing money up the wall.

Still a bit on the high side. My i7 esxi server (and 16tb (un)raid server) pulls 140 watts on average. The cost is roughly £160 a year.

[doodab]

Still a bit on the high side. My i7 esxi server (and 16tb (un)raid server) pulls 140 watts on average. The cost is roughly £160 a year.

Yes but that only has 1 CPU, similar to my self builds. I'm talking about dual socket boxes with 8 or 12 cores and 2-3x the memory.

[stek]

Yes but that only has 1 CPU, similar to my self builds. I'm talking about dual socket boxes with 8 or 12 cores and 2-3x the memory.

Just got the X4600M2 today, fired it up with 8 cores, 32gb RAM, 2x73gb SAS and it's sat at 533w while ESX 5.1 is installing.