If you read my blog about the Sidetrip to the “M” space, you have seen the pictures of rows and rows of blade servers my cousins work with in Germany.
Not to be outdone, I decided to show off my server closet – here at home, which is also a dedicated server closet! Working in the IT space brings certain oddities with the job, like running your own little IT universe right from home. Even for a girl.
If you take a closer look you will see two servers, a PE 1800 and a newer PE840 64x system. Now I could tell you what is currently running on these but then I’d get in trouble. Let me just say that I do get to enjoy receiving e-mail with Exchange Server 2007 and WM6. SWEET! But it’s time to get more equipment. An IBM z9 would be just about right. “Oh Lord, won’t you buy me an IBM z, my friends all drive microkernelized Hyper-V” , ok so am I but I need more RAM!
RAM, GBs and Virtualization
One challenge is the RAM and GB requirements for the new server OSs. If you take a look at Oliver Sommer’s site EBSFAQ.de and click on EBS/Setup/Hardware Requirements you will see an entry by Mikael Nystrom talking about the hardware requirements for EBS. You are looking at 100GB OS partitions and a reality check of at least 4GB RAM for the Management and Messaging Server. Not a big deal – if you have three servers, but try building a test lab on a laptop! Let me just add that other new software … won’t be able to run in a virtual environment on a laptop either due to RAM requirements.
Being used to doing work while traveling, I have become accustomed to create my virtual images on a laptop. It used to be that you could run a scenario with one SBS2003 server and two client machines while sitting in a lonely hotel room. No longer! What am I going to do now? Watch TV and relax?
Sure, I can add that bigger beefier server with 32GB of RAM, use Hyper-V to run my images and connect from remote – but try that when you are on a wireless connection in a hotel room in Moscow, using your Mom’s DSL in Germany, at a bed and breakfast in New Hampshire or a ten hour flight! Yikes.
Laptop training days are over!
What’s all this commotion about? It means that pretty soon when you are going to visit that Microsoft Hands-On-Lab coming to town, you will no longer be sitting in front of a laptop – unless they start making them with 10GB of RAM. Now that would be nice J