Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Home Lab expansion…

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I’ve posted an overview of my homelab a while back and it changed a bit over the course of the last couple of months so I wanted to do an update of the article. Let me disclose first that Drobo was kind enough to provide me with a test-unit. Thanks Drobo!

My Workstation which runs Windows 7 with VMware Workstation on top of it. The most important change is the addition of an SSD drive. I ran two nice Seagate Cheetah 15k SAS drives in RAID-0 for a while, but started to get annoyed by the ticking sound these drives produce. It’s not a defect it is part of the mechanism, but very annoying background noise.

And another substantial change is the lab storage. I used to run on two Iomega IX4’s. Although these are very cool devices unfortunately they are “limited” to four drives and I was looking for some more capabilities to extend some of the tests I am conducting. I just received a brand new Drobo B800i with 6 x 7.2k Sata drives. Which means I have two slots left which I might just fill up with SSD for the sake of it.

  • Drobo B800i (new)
  • 6 x Western Digital 7.2k Drive

If I would give one tip though to the Drobo folks, make the dashboard available over http/https rather than a separate utility. Hopefully I can do some performance testing next week or the week after when I have some more time on my hands.

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Comments

  1. Andy says

    Hey Duncan

    Killer Drobo. It would be interesting to see what performance the Drobo offers using the SSD’s having seen rather limited performance in other reviews.

    Andy

  2. kennyd says

    So… what are you doing with the ix4’s?

    I currently have 1 ix4, but would be interested in a second.. You have them with 8tb?

  5. Jason says

    I had reviewed a Drobo Pro and DroboS a while back, the Pro was less than impressive – even though it earned a VMware certification. I tested a Drobo Elite and wasn’t more impressed…

    I’m still very happy with the DroboS (eSATA) to my desktop for fast (75MB/sec) access and sick amount of storage (2.5TB using 5 x 500GB 7.2k drives).

    I’m more pleased with my two year old T400 thinkpad with 8GB of ram and a 256GB SSD… I can run entire exchange test labs without kicking up a sweat. I think you’ll be very happy with your SSD in your test lab.

    • Ron says

      Those “designed for …”, “certified by …”, etc labels are primarily for marketing purposes, because when u look into those certification programs most of the time the only hard requirement is that device/software A works correctly with device/software B. Performance is seldom a requirement to get certified.

      So when u buy a VMware certified device u know it works with VMware nothing more.

  6. Larry says

    Hi Duncan, loved the HA,DRS book. Thanks for a good read.

    We purchased one of these last month for ISO storage at work. It was either this or add another self to the EMC. It works OK although I would not want to run any production servers directly off of it. The thing die when deleting a LUN and had to be rebooted.

    Finding the CHAP username for the LUN’s was a painful. I had to call Drobo and get forwarded to engineering before someone told me to use id1 for LUN1, id2 for LUN2…..the documentation said to use D800i?

    I agree 100% about what you said regarding the management console. I also had to setup a virtual machine port group and place a dedicated device on it to manage the Drobo because my iSCSI network is isolated. Is this the way to go about it.

    I would be interested in how you set yours up.