Having studied networking as a unit of my IT course at college, I’d decided after finishing the unit that I’d like to take it further. So I bought myself a server – a Dell PowerEdge 1950 to be exact!

I’m looking to use the server to build up my experience of enterprise systems so will be installing VMWare on a RAID 1 configuration, then creating a number of Windows VM’s to try to get an understanding of the VMWare software and also remote management through VMWare vSphere Client.

So far, I’ve setup a switch and am running the server through the LAN network whilst I test it out. I’m mainly a Windows guy, so decided to install Windows Server 2008 R2 as I already had a basic understanding of the menus and general layout of the OS.

Possible projects involving the server include:

• Monitoring TCP/IP connections using New Relic and Boundary – Already doing this
• Remote accessing the server using Dell’s DRAC card (w/ dedicated NIC)
• Configuring the server to run a DNS so that I can host websites
• Setting up IIS web server
• Running game servers
• Load balancing

I’m looking to have it hosted in a datacentre in the future, but for the time being it’s on my home network running a few hours a week when I’m using it.