[geeks] Dell sale on T105 Server

[Lionel Peterson]

Just a heads-up for anyone thinking about a nice, small Virtual
Machine hosting box, Dell is having a pretty good sale on their T105
Server.

The current config is $449 (plus S/H and taxes) and includes a quad
core Opteron 1352, 2x2 Gig RAM (4G total, upgradeable to 4x2 Gig or 8
Gig total), two 250 Gig SATA drives, a DVD-ROM drive, and a 3 year NBD
business hours warranty.

You can up the RAM for $70 to the full 8 Gig. (a reasonable price, IMHO)

You can step up to a faster Opteron 1354 for $40, and a Opteron 1356
is another $270 (Newegg sells this chip for about $100).

I have been working with my server running Windows Server 2008 and a
few Hyper-V guests and it runs fine (I'm using it as a test
environemnt to learn about Windows Server 2008 for work), and the free
Windows Hyper-V Server 2008 also runs fine. Solaris doesn't like parts
of this system, but OpenSolaris has better hardware support (as I
recall). I like this box, I think it is a good deal, and I thought I
would share it here.

If you want to run Solaris, you'll likely want to grab the latest
driver for the Broadcom NIC on-board here:
http://www.broadcom.com/support/ethernet_nic/netxtreme_server.php (it
was last updated June, 2009). There may be an issue with the nVidia
SATA controller and the internal SATA DVD drive, but a USB device
should get you over the hump.

Hope this helps.
-- 
Lionel Peterson
lionel4287 at gmail.com