IBM xSeries 342

This piece of hardware kicked off my homelab back in the day, and has been with me since 2004. I started out running vmware 2.5 on it with a few virtual machines (DC, Exchange, Webserver, Fileserver) to start my home/development network. Many times I would use it to try or test things before going back to my work/production network. Many hours were spent learning. The EXP300 direct attached storage unit was wired to the xSeries 342 and held my ever growing digital music and movie collection.

Somehow this machine has stayed with me over the past 20+ years, moving to three different houses. Its been powered off for 10+ years and was rediscovered at the bottom of my "new" homelab rack when I decided to get serious about starting a "Vintage Rack." It now resides at the bottom of the vintage rack. I plan to use it to re-learn NT4, Netware, and some of the software I used early in my career.

Photos