[Remove 6 Xserves- Build Replacement (cost less than 1 Mac Pro)]

The project goal - Remove 6 outdated 2008 Xserve's while maintaining Mac OS X infrastructure and spending a fraction of the original price.

 

After reading this insightful article by archedraft on Mac OS X KVM Virtual Machine https://macosxvirtualmachinekvm.wordpress.com/guide-mac-os-x-10-11-el-capitan-vm-on-unraid/ I decided to test it out on my unRaid system at home. After ironing out the bugs and successfully implementing multiple VMs of Mac OS X, I figured I could move this solution to our small server room at work.

 

Looking for anything I may have missed or feedback.

 

Price for everything:2,289.03 USD

 

OS at time of building:unRAID Basic 6.1.9 

CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2670 Eight Cores Processors 2.60Ghz SR0KX (2)

CPU Cooler:Dynatron R23 Vapor Chamber Base with Aluminum Stacked Fin (2)

Motherboard: ASRock Motherboard Intel LGA 2011 EP2C602-2TS6/D16

RAM:Kingston KVR16R11D4K4/64 (4x16)

Case:NORCO 2U Rack Mount Server Chassis - Black RPC-270

Drive Cage(s):iStarUSA BPU-124V2-SS

Power Supply:Athena Power AP-U2ATX80FEP8

Cables: SAS to 4 SATA (included with motherboard)

Fans:Noctua NF-A8 PWM (4) (replacing NORCO fans)

 

Parity Drive:PNY SSD7CS2211-960-RB 960GB

Data Drives:PNY SSD7CS2211-960-RB 960GB (3)

Total Drive Capacity: 2.61TB (Actual) unRaid Calculator http://unraid.category5.tv/

 

Server RailsNORCO RL-20 Heavy Duty Slide Rail

 

Primary Use:VM Server to host DHCP, DNS, Open Directory, File Serving, NetInstall, Printer Serving, Software Caching, Render Farming for Cinema 4D, Retrospect Backups... Basically everything.

 

Future Plans: Add 4 more SSD for capacity, more RAM if necessary. Build secondary server for Mail and Filemaker with HDD for databases.

 

[***GUIDE*** Mac OS X 10.11 El Capitan – VM on unRAID]

@archedraft

 

1st, thank you for the guide. I'm slowly tweaking things, but this is great!

 

2nd, can you run Novabench w & w/out GPU inside your VM and post results. I'm running 4cores 2+2HT on a Xeon 1230v3, 4GB RAM and getting 649. (edit EL CAPITAN)

 

3rd, I was attempting to run Teamviewer from inside the VM and it's allowing me to have LAN access, but not internet. Can you think why that might be? I'm able to upload, download, ping from the browser, but Teamviewer is not accepting incoming. Bridgemode is active, br0 is set. Problem resolved itself and I don't know why... I'll dig into that later.

 

I'm going to attempt to consolidate my old 2008 xserves into one machine.