Cisco UCS C240 M4 home lab server

Over the last few weeks, I've been having a few frustrating technical problems with my home lab setup. I decided to bite the bullet and pulled the trigger on a used Cisco UCS C240 M4 server which I found on eBay. It's a 2U rackmount server with 2 Intel Xeon E5-2680 v3 12 CPUs, this gives me 24 cores (48 logical cores) along with 64GB of DDR4 RAM soon to be upgraded to 128GB. This gives a lot of compute power to play with, especially for a home lab server!

The server has a 16 hard drive capacity, including a Cisco UCS 12G SAS Modular RAID controller which looks after either SAS or 2.5" SATA drives. There were already 2 x 1TB Seagate Barracuda 2.5" drives installed in the UCS so just to keep things simple I bought another pair of 2TB drives to keep things uniform. I'll revisit this configuration at some point, but for now, this will be enough to get me going, this isn't a NAS and won't be running 24x7. These disks will be presented to ESXi and be used as virtual machine Datastores.

There are 2 SD slots directly on the server motherboard referred to as the FlexFlash controller. The UCS came with one Scandisk 32GB SD card populated, this is where VMware ESXi is currently installed. From what I have read I can add another 32GB SD card and use a RAID 1 to mirror the data, which will, in turn, provide redundancy which is a pretty cool feature. This UCS-c240-M4S2 server is on the VMware compatibility list and as a bonus supports ESXi 7.0 release.

From a Network connectivity point of view, I currently have 6 Gigabit Ethernet ports at my disposal and a dedicated management port which is used to access the Cisco Integrated Management Controller (CIMC) via the web browser which uses HTML 5, unlike the older M3 servers that still uses Flash which these days are not supported by current browsers.

If you are interested in taking a look around inside the CIMC check out my YouTube video below.