Posts made by christophergault

@johnhooks Well that is great, what type of private data have they been caught for stealing?

@scottalanmiller That makes sense, however my father (owner of the business) has had a bad experience with Dell and has used Lenovo in the past and loves them. What could we do about the potential "Lenvo hacking" if we end up going with the TD350...

@scottalanmiller Sounds like Lenovo needs a beating haha, I heard Dell has allot of bloat ware however...

@scottalanmiller Damn, I still have allot to learn about all this...

@scottalanmiller Your entire post makes a lot of sense, as for not going with Lenovo what is your biggest fear of them?

Hey, after speaking with @scottalanmiller yesterday I have been looking around for a tower system that can run a website, virtual desktops, database, and active directory.

I found the Lenovo TD350 with five hot swap drives. The specs of the machine are two Intel Xeon E5 2620 v3 2.4 Ghz processors, 64 GB of ECC RAM, four 2TB hot swap drives set in RAID 5, a single 240GB SSD (for ESXi) and a AMD FirePro W700 for VDI enhancement.

The networking for the system is already set in stone. Using a set of Cisco Meraki MX 64s at two locations we are able to create a VPN to the locations so managing low-level system architecture is easy from two locations.

The site where the server is located at already has an on-site natural gas powered generator with 22 second delay from power failure, in sight of this we already have a smart APC battery backup unit that will provide power for the dual redundant server as the generator is powering up.

Software is pretty simple; vSphere 6 for the host OS (installed on the SSD), a couple Windows 10 Pro licensees for VDI, vSphere 6 Essentials, Windows Server 2012 R2 for active directory, CentOS 7 running NGINX for website, CentOS 7 for Redis database, and a couple other guest machines as the small company grows.

What are your opinions on this setup?

@DustinB3403 said:

Xen Orchestra

I agree with the ISO store, I did however use my Drobo 5N as the ISO store. I personally like vSphere 6, they have a free version that requires you to use the "somewhat" outdated vSphere Client but its not that bad...

Thanks @scottalanmiller ! Ya pretty much the IT guy for an small real estate appraisal business and getting into film effects rendering, and ya... about 10 hrs behind @scottalanmiller in time zone so pretty interesting he is up right now haha.