Dell PowerEdge T710 VMware ESXi Virtualisation Server

Over many years I had built hundreds of virtual machines using a pair of desktop replacement laptops. Starting back at Microsoft when we used VMware Workstation for our VMs, this being prior to the release of Hyper-V.

I used a pair of ASUS K95V laptops with Intel i7 processors, 32GB memory and 2 x 2TB disks, connected with a 100mb/s switch.

This provided a reasonable amount of VMs with Microsoft SQL Servers, Microsoft SharePoint Servers running on various Microsoft Windows Servers. With some spare capacity I could also have a large number of Linux distros for testing out.

As a portable solution (2 x 4kg) this provided many years of service as I kept up to date with the Microsoft SharePoint on-prem offerings from Microsoft.

Then in 2022, after watch a YouTube video where older server hardware was being repurposed to host VMware ESXi on the bare metal, I decided to look into this as an option to replace the two laptops with server class hardware. I was not really keen on building up server racks but had seen that the T series of the Dell PowerEdge class servers were basically rack servers but in a tower case.

So onto the hunt I went…