Finally got time to update my one of my servers. 7 years ago, I made a 468.07 investment for my first dedicated home lab server (aka Goliath) and has made me the man I am today ?. This weekend provided some much-needed love to server and did some upgrades to accommodate new requirements and keep it going.
- Updated Drives
- Added additional GPU
- Replace fans
- Install VMWare ESXi
Services on Goliath had already been moved to a backup system (See Tweet), below are info on work done this weekend.
Updated Drives:
Updated drives from 4 500GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 Serial ATA drives to 4 3TB Hitachi Ultrastar 7K3000 drives providing an ample 10.92 TB of data storage. This will be the additional storage for anything hosted on server.
Added additional GPU:
The plan is to move Media Server Services back to this system. I added a NVIDIA TESLA C2075 Graphical Process Unit (GPU) on the system to help with the transcoding and encoding that will be needed on media service guest server that will be running on this system.
Replace fans:
One of the fans was blown and the other 2 where old and noisy, with the new GPU addition the system will need all the fans at optimal performance. I replaced 3 chassis fans with Cooler Master Silent fan 120 S12 to help with the heat and added an extra fan underneath hard drive bay.
Install VMWare ESXi:
I installed VMWare ESXi 6.7 on the system instead of reinstalling Hyper-V to make use of it’s pass-through feature. This will allow me to use the GPU on a guest OS running on the system.
NOTE: download link for ESXi 7.0 was not working and did not have time to waste, already had 6.7