 I have this Dell, well Dell EMC as their logo says now. I guess I'm supposed to start calling them Dell EMC. They wrote it on here. I have this Dell EMC 340. We're gonna talk about this little project we got for a client and a little bit of planning and some of the process we go through for this. So because we do a lot of refer to as co-managed IT where there's an internal IT department that needs help delivering a solution, that's what this is. This is the solution we're gonna deliver them. Now we didn't choose a server they did. They already have a relationship with Dell so they went ahead with a Dell based on our suggestion for how much they needed in terms of horsepower. Now they actually didn't need as much memory but nicer but their budget wasn't really, I always say throw more memory in because the future always requires more memory but this is adequate with only 32 gigs in there. It's the only downside but it fit in their budget because their budget went heavy on having eight SSDs in here so you have eight terabytes of solid state storage. Now that's where things are great. That is important to have really high performance, fast storage for all these smaller virtual machines that we're gonna be converting for them because what they have now is bare metal. Everything runs on bare metal which of course is a little bit harder because it's not as easy to snapshot and roll back, et cetera, virtualization. Well, everything should be virtualized for the most part of my opinion with the exception of certain tools that need to run on bare metal but operating systems like Windows is not really one of them. Back to the server here. Now, this is brand new but if you are looking for a deal I will give a shout out to one of the affiliates we have for the channel, Tech Supply Direct. They have a lot of great deals on servers, hardware and there's an offer code below to get you 10% off your purchase. We buy a lot from them. We did price it out. This company wanted to go all brand new. I said, okay, so that's where they're at with that. Back to the server here. So let's dive down and look at the specs and we'll start with pulling up the little Dell EMC plenum right here to uncover. Yes, just a single Xeon E2136, 3.3 gigahertz, 12 meg cache, 6 core, 12 thread count here. So not bad, definitely performs quite well. We're impressed with the performance of it. Loading XCPNG in here, no problems and we'll get to that in a second. Then we have, as I stated, only 32 gigs of RAM but hey, that's not bad. Then over here, let's go ahead and pop out this right here. Slide this straight up. It's got little guide pins on it. Ooh, get that out of the way. The Dell Perk H730P RAID controller with two gigs of cache on there and that is controlling, like I said, all these solid state drives that are up in the front here. Like I said, we have eight 1.9 terabyte drives giving us a really good solid flash array here of a lot of speed. Now, it is a dual power supply for redundancy because occasionally that is what happens with servers that are older, the power supplies will fail. These are hot swappable so you can just pop them out and have them in a redundant mode. Now, this is a relatively efficient when it comes to power, hence the reason these are only 350 watt supplies. So it's not, this thing's not an absolute power hog. It doesn't run too warm, runs pretty well. We also do have the USB here but you notice we're not using it. We're gonna get to that in a second. So we decided, and the way we designed this and slide this back down and snap it in, tool-less, that we're just going to run XEPNG directly on these and like I said, I'll cover that a little bit more depth. But we wanted the RAID controller to handle everything and just create one large drive. Now, for connectivity on the back here, we'll spin it around a little bit. The unfortunate thing is we only have the two 1GNICs and we have the one iDRAC so we can do the lights out management with the Dell iDRAC system. The two 1GNICs are fine for what their current system supports. We will be adding a 10GIG, probably Intel-based card like the 520 series later. But as of right now, they don't have any switches that can support 10GIG. So this is all gonna run in one gig. Like I said, for the lower bandwidth that they need for this particular client, it's not really that big of a deal. But they wanted to make sure they had that expandability there. They just want to spend the price right now and you can pick those cards up, not from Dell when you buy them relatively cheap. There's sometimes a little bit more expensive to buy them when you're ordering to Dell versus, you can find one aftermarket for a relatively low price. Now, XCP and G running on this. So I've done plenty of testing on a lot of different Intel-based hardware. XCP and G is pretty solid, pretty reliable. And when it comes to a lot of the Dell servers and we've tried them on a big variety of them and including some of the HP ones and even a handful of super micros, we find compatibility to be excellent with XCP and G provided you're going all Intel. Now I do know they've added a lot of support recently but I have not done thorough testing with this but you can spend some time in a forum for those asking with AMD. There's sometimes some BIOS tweaks you have to load but for the most part loading on these two ones like this Dell, no problem. Now, why didn't we load it on a USB and then use this 100% for storage? Well, XCP and G, if you have the RAID controller, control the RAID and yes, I am aware that XCP and G if you pass the drive through to it can handle the RAID but we set this up so the iDRAC will send out notifications that there's any problems with the RAID array and the RAID array is being handled so it presents as one large drive to XCP and G and it's in a RAID six format which gives us plenty of performance being at their solid state and by doing that when we load XCP and G it will parse out the part it needs for the operating system for the hypervisor XCP and G and then the rest will be dedicated to the VM storage over here leaving us like I said about six terabytes of usable and it works wonderful for doing that. Now we've formatted this over in EXT three, I covered how do we're gonna do the P2V in a previous video, I wanted to make sure I covered that as something we've done quite a bit is get people off of either other hypervisors or occasionally especially more often physical hardware and they're moving over to the virtualized world where life gets a lot easier. Now once this is all done we take some of those hardware even though it's probably about five years old there's still some relevant hardware they're gonna have it's gonna become the backup server for this and I've talked about that in video when you can take Zen Orchestra you can take the backups and set what we refer to as delta backups which means only do the differential changes do them even as much as hourly depending on the VM that's running on there and now you have these regular backups that you keep on a hot spare. So the other machines that we're gonna be removing physically and virtualizing the operating system and running on them into here will just become part of the backups out there. Now there's always someone gonna be rattling their fists and going but I love VMWare and I love Proxmox or I love whatever why do you like XCPNG? Well one I'm very familiar with it I've been using it for a long time and the fact that it's 100% open source with no license fees and I know Proxmox has too makes it a really easy choice. Now I know someone's gonna point out that you can get Hyper-V for free but you're still basing it on Windows and there still gets confusing on how the licensing work when you wanna put a UI on it but I know there's a command line one and I've just really liked the scalability and ease of use when it comes to XCPNG. It's a great platform. So once we have all that on there they are encouraged but it depends on what their situation is we will encourage many of the clients and many of them do buy at least for the first year after we hand this off to them they'll buy a support package through XCPNG if they want to do anything advanced with it or at least buy a subscription to ZenOrchestrous so they get all the updates and facilitates the full features of it. So that's a lot of times when people ask well it's not exactly free I'm like yeah I know but I'd much rather pay for support than pay for licenses just to keep the lights turned on on it and that's why reasons also back to XCPNG is why I like it. Now overall like I said pretty straightforward system we do a lot of these where we don't always get to have the hardware this client happened to be local to us so we went ahead and loaded it and I figured while it was here I'd do a quick video on it and give it a look at this as enterprise hardware is a lot different than the build it yourself hardware and when it comes to delivering servers I'm not always a build it yourself kind of guy when I'm putting those in because you want something that has a support I mean they're relatively close to us they're about an hour away but you know the nice thing is they bought the full warranty with Dell they have like a big enterprise farmers they got about 60 workstations they bought from Dell as well so they have that same ongoing warranty where they'll come out and swap in either hardware so if a power supply goes bad Dell will shift them another one and they don't have to hunt down anything which doesn't make it a bad choice because a lot of times it's about ease of use and I have a feeling they're gonna probably upgrade memory later I don't think 32 gigs is a lot but that's what they have and actually for the VMs there's a couple small VMs that are gonna be running in us it's gonna be completely adequate it's just me future thinking going hey buy it now but yeah they didn't cause memory maybe is a little bit expensive I'm not sure what came down to that choice but we abstract ourselves from the hardware we don't play a lot in the hardware market cause sometimes it's gonna be a race as your a margin but if you're looking for some deals on use hardware and not wanting to pay that full price go ahead and reach out to tech supply tract I'll plug them again because we do offer people getting a lot of stuff through them because well you can get a server that's only slightly used for a pretty good price as well so that's it for the Dell 340 we're gonna get this project rolling for the client it's gotta get delivered find a little finishing touches and details for those wondering when I set these up we match it to their environment and how do we do that magic cause I've had people ask it's actually simpler than you think I'm gonna grab a probably a PSense set it on top of here match the IP ranges to their environment which don't happen to match my environment and then I'll set the IP address of static so when we drop this off and their IT team racks it they already know they already told me what IPs they want it to be set at they already have the password set to what they asked everything's set as soon as this comes on and boots in their office we've already done a little bit of burn-in testing here we load it put some VMs on there spin them up, stress test them a little bit and delete them reinstall the OS one more time for the hell of it to make sure it's nice and wiped clean for any demos we put on here including the demo I just used their computer for and it works great no issues, no crashes and it'll get rack stacked and ready to go and we'll finish the P2V project thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video if you liked this video please give it a thumbs up if you'd like to see more content from the channel hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon if you'd like YouTube to notify you when new videos come out if you'd like to hire us head over to laurancesystems.com fill out our contact page and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on if you want to carry on the discussion head over to forums.laurancesystems.com where we can carry on the discussion about this video other videos or other tech topics in general even suggestions for new videos that are accepted right there on our forums which are free also if you'd like to help the channel in other ways head over to our affiliate page we have a lot of great tech offers for you and once again thanks for watching and see you next time