Ah, the pitter patter of new equipment....

Alright, actually really old equipment.

Today my boss is bringing in all of the equipment from the old backup site. There are some fairly heavy duty pieces of equipment, really. I have no idea where I'm going to put it or what I'll do with it all once I get it where it's going, but it's nice to have some spare kit laying around.

Some of it is going to get earmarked for the new tech stuff that I want to learn. Some of the machines have enough processor and RAM that I can make them ESXi hosts, and Hyper-V hosts, since I really do want to try that as well.

There's a 1.6TB external storage array coming on which I'll probably setup Openfiler. It should be fine as a playground for booting VMs over the SAN.

No, the real problem is going to figure out who to cool the machine closet, at this point.

Our building (an 8 floor office building in suburban New Jersey) turns off the air conditioning at 6pm and on the weekends. Normally, this isn't a problem for me, since I've really only got 4 servers and an XRaid here. The additional machines that I'd like to run will cause a significant issue with the ambient temperature, and I'm going to have to figure something out.

I do have a small portable AC unit which I believe will process enough BTUs to take care of it, but I'll have to get the numbers to back that up, and even then I'll have to figure out how to vent it so that I'm not breaking any codes. Definitely have to do research on that.

So there's my next couple of days.