The day finally came when the shipment from PC Server and Parts arrived. It was four nicely packed boxes weighing in at a small 47 pounds apiece.
Of course they had to pass customs inspection of the DSA (Dog Security Agency). After inspection and finding that these packages included no biscuits or other materials that would be confiscated then the full unboxing could commence.
Here is the hardware list again:
- Quantity four (4) Dell Precision Tower 7820 Workstation
- Processors: 2x (2.20 GHz) 10-Core Intel Xeon Silver 4114 Processors
- Memory (RAM): 384GB (12x32GB) DDR4 2133 MHz PC4 R Memory
- Storage:
- 1TB SSD SATA 6GB/s 2.5″ Solid State Drive
- M.2 Storage: 2TB M.2 NVMe Solid State Drive
- HP Z Turbo M.2 Adapter Card
- Graphics Card: Nvidia Quadro K600 1GB DDR3
- Network: Intel X540 Dual 10GbE network card
I’ve moved the systems into my office and temporarily setup the networking using my Ubiquiti UniFi 10GbE Aggregation switch to 4 10GbE UniFi Flex switches which will provide the connectivity to these systems. The Aggregation switch is connected via fiber to my UniFi UDM-SE which handles the inter-VLAN routing and network firewall along with 1GbE Symmetric FTTH internet connectivity.
So that is the unboxing. At this point they will live for a little while in a temporary location at the side of my office. I’ll likely connect them to the TV and use it to step through the installation of ESXi and the basic network setup for vSphere 8.
Looking forward to this next part as it has been a while since I’ve physically done an install where I can actually put my hands on the keyboard/video/mouse and not use a remote KVM solution like iDRAC. Till next time!