A few months back I’d purchased a (used) Dell PowerEdge T310 Server. I came across one in a search where the price was right to give this a go. Currently, I run one home server with a personal home page, file server, etc. Whereas the first one was limited as it’s a compact version, running hardware that’s a few years old, and a little under powered to do much more than serve up movies via Plex.

With the PowerEdge T310, I’d installed VMWare vSphere Hypervisor (ESXi), and two instances of Ubuntu, 32 and 64 bit, respectively. I’d not done much with it in the 2 months since purchasing, but I’ve dusted it off, started an instance of Windows 10 and am formulating some plans for use. I’ve already a hosting package, so more websites (such as this one) running from a personal server makes little sense today. To begin, I do plan to experiment more with some Rails applications, Django, and get SQL Server on the Windows instance. Since I’ve not yet upgraded my existing home server to 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) I went ahead and put a an instance of desktop and server on there.

The machine I purchased came with just 4GB RAM, so I purchased another 8 (2 x 4) and installed over the weekend. This didn’t go smoothly. First boot – issue. Great, I thought, eBay didn’t come through despite it looking like a seller with plenty of sales for just this machine. A little bit of fiddling around showed me I didn’t install in the right slots. And with everything buttoned up again, another error – ‘memory configured but unusable’. Well, hmm. In short, turns out the earlier boards only support memory modules up to 2GB, so that would max this machine out at 12. I think this will still be plenty, so I’ve put in another order and for now, I’ll run one or two virtual machines until I can install the new memory.