When I started building my first server, I had no idea I had built a server. A trip to BestBuy resulted in a purchase of a NAS (Network Attached Storage) to put music and movies on. There just wasn’t enough room on my PC to have games, art, programs, music and movies. Something had to get moved somewhere else because I couldn’t keep uninstalling / reinstalling Roller Coaster Tycoon 3 and Command & Conquer: Generals to play with my kids as I had the rest of that stuff on my PC. Once it was purchased, the transfer was started of the music and movies onto the NAS and I could install more games. This resulted in my first benefit of having a server.
My kids then came along and wanted a Minecraft server. I’m not going to get into the lack of information and how I built one for them, but lets just say it was 3-6 months of self-inflicted nightmare. Once it was set, ports forwarded, everyone joined and had a blast. This resulted in my second server and sat right next to my NAS server on the Tool bench in the garage.
Having my kids and all their friends over to game in the Garage LAN center I built meant tons of the same questions being asked to me every weekend. The solution was setting up a website for them to go to and get the information there. This not only meant I needed to learn HTML & CSS to start but build a webserver. Once it was done, it was built and setup next to the NAS and Minecraft server on the tool bench.
Running out of space on the tool bench, I bought a shelf rack from Lowe’s to put the servers on. Things were looking really good for me as a newb, I had no clue but, without any direction yet, this is how I was doing it. Then the Engineers at Intel showed up and told me I should look into Hypervisors and VMWare. It took me a few months but I built my first server that was a Xeon Silver 4116 scalable, 256GB of EEC RAM and a couple HDD’s with an SSD for the OS. I actually tried to install Windows 7 on it, then Windows 10. This is where I looked into VMWare and found ESXi, vSphere and vCenter.
Some of the Intel Engineer’s decided to help out a bit and gave me some assistance with information on what I was getting into. Once it was all setup they gave me a quick walk through via remote session using TeamViewer. At this point I was in total amazement of what a hypervisor was and all its power.
All 3 servers that were on my Tool Bench were backed up and rebuilt within the hypervisor along with more servers to be built as well in the hypervisor. Next purchase was a 42U, 4 post rack that a single 4U chassis was installed into. It was so empty!
So many benefits from having the Hypervisor! Sure it cost more, like a lot more than the 3 first servers built. But while those first 3 servers have all died or been torn down and parted out, it’s been almost a decade and that first hypervisor is still alive today hosting this webpage as well!