Cheap testbed for apprentices

[JustAnotherMe]

Hi there,

I would like to offer my apprentice some testbed for playing with virtual machines and storage handling in plain OS. No need for enterprise reliability or performance. Price is what matters and I would like to use all parts lying around - and maybe buy cheap used additional parts.

I've got an out-of-support HP ProLiant with P420, 2-port 8-ch IBM (LSI) ServeRaid M1015 flashed to IT mode and a bunch of 3.5 SATA (not SAS) disks. The two ServeRaid SAS ports are already cabled to external SFF-8088 ports.

Now there is an offer to buy an older, used HP M6720 24-bay disk enclosure for little money. Can I cable it to e.g. the ServeRaid HBA with one(?) SFF-8088 to SFF-8088 cable? I don't need/can use a redundant loop, nor a storage controller. I only want to access 24 SATA(!) drives in the enclosure, maybe using OS software RAID.

Thank you for your answers in advance.

Kind regards,

C.

[Pra_Sah]

Hello JustAnotherMe,

Thank you for sharing your query.

I would like to inform that mix and match of HPE and Non-HPE products is not supported. So in this case we cannot share our recommendations on your queries.

Regards,