When I was a university student, I had a MacBook Air with 8 GB RAM. I used it for my 1st semester, and I ran a few VMs. Still, I felt I needed something more powerful and mobile because I needed a powerful computer in my classroom to enjoy my studies.
I bought a second-hand Dell Precision M4600 with 32GB RAM to run many VMs using VMware Workstation Pro. It was excellent, and I could do all my university assignments with that laptop. I ran many VMs and did all kinds of tests. But still, something was missing, and I was looking at different ways to speed up my IT learning and get a practical experience.
One day I went to help out my friend who was getting old servers from a local company. My friend didn’t want the Dell EMC storage, the server rack, and a few old HP/Dell servers because they were too old. Then I thought, “I’ll take them,” and we carried those to my home. It was funny to take a full-sized 42U IBM rack up narrow stairs, and those Dell EMC storages were heavy as hell. We even broke our trolley with those. I was so happy to finally have servers at home. The feeling was fantastic but short-lived.
Then I realized they are taking too much power, and it wasn’t a good idea to use them at home. But, oh, the noise was horrific like a jet engine. Theoretically, the noise problem could be solved quickly by replacing their fans with Noctua Fans. But the power usage was already insane even though the servers were not powerful.
After this, I realized I should build a quiet home lab that doesn’t use much power. I was googling day and night to find the solution and what hardware to buy for my home lab. I was thinking of buying a gamer’s motherboard to add 128GB RAM and an Intel i9 Extreme CPU because I was looking for a CPU with as many cores as possible. Unfortunately, the price was insane, and the i9 wasn’t out yet.
Then I found a Supermicro motherboard with an A2SDV-16C-TLN5F CPU with 16 cores. Sadly, I didn’t check whether this Atom CPU would support Hyper-Threading Technology. Fortunately, the server is very powerful and takes a max of 45W. I run out of memory before running out of cores. During that time, RAM was very expensive and still is. I got only 128GB. That was one of my most expensive purchases and still is.
Then I was on a mission to figure out how to get a VMware vSphere at a low cost. I found VMUG. Becoming a VMUG Advantage member, you get an evolution license for all VMware products. I couldn’t believe my eyes that was possible. For only a few hundred euros, I could get all the VMware products. The rest is history.