My new home lab equipment has arrived, and it’s all up and running with Ubuntu and Rackspace Private Cloud as my first deployment.Hopefully this will spur on a bit more blogging by me, but for now I wanted to put together the parts used to build the system.

First of all, I bought 3 HP ProLiant N54L Microservers from ebuyer – other suppliers were a little cheaper, but ebuyer had them and the other parts I wanted in stock. With £100 cashback from HP for each server currently on offer, that works out at less than £100 per server including VAT!

I then added 16GB of RAM per server (not a HP supported configuration, but a couple of blog post comments suggested some memory sticks worked), using 2 of these Corsair Value Select 8GB DIMMS per server, part number CMV8GX3M1A1333C9.

The microserver’s only have 1Gb network port embedded, so I’ve added a TP-Link TG-3468 PCIe Gb Network Card to each one, and paired them to a TP-Link TL-SG1008D 8-port Gigabit Switch to join the existing 5 port TP-Link switch I already had, so I have a separate management and data network

This set of hardware has given me 3 dual-core 2.2GHz servers with virtualisation support, 16GB of RAM in each, 250GB of local storage in each, and 2x1Gb networks.

Future plans include additional local storage, and probably some kind of network storage!