Dell PowerEdge T20 Notes

Bought one of these for running various business services.

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Got it cheap with cashback for less than the CPU would cost in retail.

The CPU and motherboard supports:

  • VT-x: Hardware virtualization
  • VT-d: Direct I/O virtualization
  • vPro: Active management technology (AMT)

Standard specifications:

  • Intel Xeon E3-1225V3
  • Ram 4Gb
  • 1Gb hard disk

Additional components:

  • Kingston 2x8Gb Ram KTD-PE313E/8G
  • Syba SATA III 4 Port PCI-e x1 Controller Card
  • Inateck 2x 2.5 Inch SSD to 3.5 Inch Internal Hard Disk Drive Mounting Kit Bracket
  • HP NC364T 436431-001 435506-003 – Quad / 4 Port Gigabit Ethernet Card Adapter

Hardware Notes

The quad NIC adapter is to enable physical separation of intranet and internet traffic.

ESXi likes to use a single NIC for a single virtual switch for a single subnet.

Hence if you want intranet and internet physically separated for VM’s you just have two virtual switches – one for intranet and one for internet – each mapped to a physical NIC.

The router the isolated the physical ports to virtual networks.

This means it is very hard to break in to the intranet even if the internet VM is compromised.

Details about this belongs in a dedicated network and router post later.

AMT Notes

Enabling AMT

During boot press ctrl-P to enable.

Connecting to AMT: http://{hostname}:16992/logon.htm

Even better download Meshcommander

Looks like this:

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AMT and VPN Issues

If you connect via VPN you may find you cannot connect to AMT.

It took me a while to find out why not…

This may be caused by you assigned a fixed IP address to the server, which is a normal thing to do for server, however it just doesn’t work then.

Be sure to use DHCP and then use the router to force the IP address using bind to IP:

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So do as above…

This entry was written by Kent Willumsen , posted on Wednesday April 05 2017at 07:04 pm , filed under Server, Technical Knowledge and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink . Post a comment below or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

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