Dell PowerEdge SC440

I got my Dell PowerEdge SC440 on Tuesday and I’ve been busy all week installing software on it and redoing my entire home network.

The hardware itself looks very well built, it weighs about 40 lbs.  The inside looks very neat.  There are 4 SATA ports but there are only 2 hard drive trays so if you need to use more than 2 hard drives you’ll need to use the CD-ROM trays.  I ordered mine with just 1 hard drive and I bought an additional 1TB SATA drive from newegg.com (around $120).  Installing the hard drive was pretty straightforward, just make sure you get a 36 in. (3 ft.) SATA cable if you want to run the cable the proper way.  This server is also very quiet.

The first thing I did with it was install VMware ESXi (VMware ESX Server 3i, 3.5.0, 110271).  It installed with no problems, it found my onboard NIC and onboard SATA controller.

I’m currently running 4 virtual machines on it (2 Windows 2003 Server, 1 Fedora Core 9, and 1 FreeBSD) and it’s running great with plenty of resources left for more VMs .

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