I have a stack of old laptops sitting here from work (I occasionally get the old ones back when they are retired). It occurred to me that laptops would make a very good “home server stack” environment. Here is my reasoning…
- They are running mobile processors so the power drain and heat generation should be low enough that I can play with this in my office and not run up my electric bill too much.
- They have battery backup built-in to each unit! 🙂 At least 15 minutes worth (some of these batteries are pretty much dead…)
- The processors are, I believe, at least Centrino 2 era… Ancient by today’s standards but good enough to throw on at least a couple of hosts for playing around with hyper-v
- They each have a screen and a keyboard for initial interfacing which cuts down on the wires needed.
- They sit on top of each other in a big tower quite nicely without the need for a jury-rigged rack.
The problems with my setup…
- They are old… I am not going to be able to run very many hosts on them… it is questionable whether or not Hyper-V will run on this procssor
- I need another switch for my network… I might be able to get an old Dell 24 port… hmm…
- It is probably going to annoy my wife…
- I want to cluster my Hyper-V hosts… that means I need shared storage which isn’t usually cheap… I have an idea though that involves building my own SAN in Linux and will probably go that route. I think I have an old workstation that can be used for that…
I will be blogging this journey and welcome you to come along. Hopefully nothing catches on fire…
Questions, comments, encouragement, ideas, and snide remarks welcome!