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!Dell PowerEdge 1950 server

 

Dell PowerEdge 1950 server

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.