Will this be overkill or otherwise not recommended for someone who is new and just starting to learn?
My goal is to have something I can grow into, but initially I'd like to host a few VMs, game servers, and a have place to store content. I'd also like to host a PLEX server in the future as well but might buy a separate piece of hardware for it specifically down the road. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help a newbie!
That’s going to be noisy as hell.
With great power comes great electricity bill...
My whole rack (6 servers and a bunch of Cisco switching equipment.)
Check the processor generation for H.265 / HEVC compatibility, I had an older HP G8 and it needed to fire up 20+ cores just to transcode a 300Mb anime
If you buy purpose built enterprise gear be mindful of the space, power and noise they produce.
go for it, get a rack with wheels, 20 odd Kilos is a pain in the ass to move about in that form factor.
it'll only be noisy on start up.
Despite what other people are saying, the noise on these depends on your bios settings. If you set everything for high performance, it's going to be loud. I'd start off with the energy saving settings until you decide you need more power. With mine set to energy saving, because it's honestly more power than I need right now with 16 cores; 32 threads; 176 GB RAM and (4) 6 TB hard drives for storage (not including boot drives), the server is actually very quiet. It's quieter than my PowerConnect 6248P POE switch. I'd say it's a great server for starting off with if you can get a good deal on it. I run VMWaee ESXI with multiple virtual machines, TrueNAS; pfSense; Plex; VMWare VCSA and a couple of others for just playing around with different operating systems when I need to. Even with power saving settings, I have no performance issues with anything I do as a home server. Now, in a production environment, data center, corporate server running critical tasks, I would never choose power saving settings. But for most people, it's not likely you will need the full performance of something like this in a home environment. And, if you start using more of the processor, or have it in a room that's not air conditioned on a warm day, it will automatically increase fan speed as needed anyway. Not that I recommend a room without temperature and humidity control of some kind, but it can handle it to an extent when not in a live production environment.
All depends on what you're looking to host. For some perspective I run a valheim server, home assistant, jellyfin media server and a handful of other applications on a 2011 mac mini i7 8 core cpu with 2 ssds using sofware raid 1 on debian. I had the ssd's lying around and picked up the mac mini from a job site recycling a bunch of equipment but it's quiet efficient for my use case. I have an old 2 bay qnap connected to that "server" using NFS so that adds 6TB for my Jellyfin server to store media on.
Uses way too much electricity.
The mini PC crowd will inevitably come in and shit on anything bigger than a matchbox that uses more than 1w.
They're not 100% wrong: power consumption is a factor but there's also a time and a place for rack servers. That time and place is when you have (or are looking to get) a rack and are looking for rock solid reliable hardware with lots of cores and hotswap storage bays, and running game servers is definitely somewhere the low core counts of mini PCs falls down.
That said, in 2023 it's probably not worth spending money on anything older than an E5 v4.
Bang on, the mini pc crowd is funny.
Power consumption isn't black and white, because you have completely different feature sets.
I agree I wouldn't grab any dell under an X30 at this point and def go with a v4, that being said if you find a good deal on a v3, a v4 upgrade is like $20 for something around a 2680
A 12/13 generation NUC with 64GB RAM eats most of those very outdated servers alive.
And storage you can easily put into a NAS with SFP+ slots.
pro argument for 10+ year racks are:
You forgot the last one
- Cool AF
Can you link a $400 NUC (with 64GB RAM) that eats this server alive? (With also CPU benchmarks?)
Running costs are a thing unless you have free energy as posted before or mama pays for it.
So you can't?
I had mini's and NUC... only problem I had was true out of band management. Intel AMT was ok ish... but not a candle to ilo idrac. I have a T330 with 64gb idling at 55w with true remote management I can hide it away.
That said, in 2023 it's probably not worth spending money on anything older than an E5 v4.
A thousand times this. I'm quite happy with my v3, but at this point it just isn't worth it short of nearly free.
My buddy gave me his old r720 to learn on. It's a workhorse. Maybe a few dollars extra on a electricity bill even with it running 24/7
I can tell you from direct experience if owning an R720XD, this bitch is loud, and hot. During the summer, AC stays on 90% of the time near max cooling, during the winter, I have no use for a heater because I already have one lmao. Power consumption is about the 250-400w constantly with HDDs with SSDs it would probably be a bit lower, but I'm sure I'm paying about 100 to 150 dollars more a year, but luckily I'm not worried about power consumption or price. If you don't care about heat, noise, and power consumption, so far, I really enjoy it! Check out my latest post where I detailed my whole current setup.
As others have said, there are way better options out there than the 720. In terms of literally everything lol. You could probably spend a couple extra 200 bucks and get something way newer, efficient, quieter, and more or equally as powerful. Let me know if you have any questions, I live with one in my bedroom lol
I'm happy to spend that much extra for better performance, especially if it helps avoid the long run annoyance of the heat and noise.
What would you recommend I keep my eye out for as an alternative?
Well first I think it'd be better to ask you first, what do you plan on using it for? Do you already know what you want to do with it? If not, I would do as others have suggested. Hold back on a rack mounted server for a while, grab a desktop, load it with ram HDDs (or SSDs) put proxmox on it, and tinker with it there. Once you've got that itch to buy more, then now at least you'll know what you need.
My use case is, running some core VMs and LXCs that will run 24/7 along with later down the line some VMs that I'll use for learning Active Directory and performing red and blue team activities on them.
I agree with people on here talking about buying a NUC type box and using that. It's likely to be as powerful or more powerful than the 720, low power usage, basically non existent noise, but you'll be missing out in storage and RAM. The cool part is, let's say you do get a NUC, play with it for a year and then you want to buy more, you can always repurpose the old NUC for some other use. There's also NUCs with dual gigabit/ 2.5 gigabit NICs in them, if you plan ahead for it's repurposing, you could convert it into a very nice router for your network. One WAN and one LAN for your home, then use a switch of some sort to give the rest of your devices connectivity.
But back to what I asked, what do you want to do with the hardware? If you don't have a clue, look at YouTube and search for other people's home lab setups, there's a variety, from purely entertainment like Plex and jellyfin to stream movies across their network, to a security lab for learning AD. Find what you want first, then build what you need for what you want.
I won't be doing anything too crazy with them, just hosting some Valheim, a PLEX server, and a couple VMs for now
If you can afford it and you have space it's not overkill.
If you have something laying around, you should start there until you know you’ll need more power/functionality. I got into homelabing/self hosting with two of these r720s I got for free. They’re awesome. I’m running multiple VMs, lxc containers, a NAS, and my power consumption is about 175 watts per r720. But my power bill is $0.11/kWh.
Overpriced for R720. At that price you can get 730 or even 740 which will be more compute dense and have ddr4 memory.
I've got a R620 and it's an outstanding box for labbing. I only keep it on when I need to use it, and it's in my basement for the noise issue. I max out at 300 watts with everything started, 170 idle.
I turn it on with the idrac when needed or with Home Assistant.
There is no such thing as overkill!
I have this exact unit in my garage just with less ram. It is the center of my home lab it runs half a dozen vms and several other things and even has gpu support. It is an expensive work horse power dies have a price though. I have invested in a rack, switches, 10gb network and more. I you do get it start small and explore its true VM power. And find a home for it that is outside your living area.
If you're anywhere near louisiana I'll sell you a r720xd with a rack and 128gb ram for $400
You can get an R730 for an extra hundred.
Won’t have drives but I see one with 24cores and 128gb ddr4 on amazon.
I have one. It’s loud. It’s power hungry.
Figured out what you’re trying to run. I turned mine off and am keeping it to the side for now. I have a 10500 with 64gb for esxi running most of my apps and it saves on power big time. For storage I just use a synology but have a power edge t330 I’ve been playing with. Even the t330 is power hungry according to kilawatt.
You can quiet the fans using IPMI.. and mine pulls about 150w loaded with 10T drives and a GPU for Plex transcoding
What CPU is in it? And I guess my spinning drives don’t shut down all the way I have around 100W idle with an AMD 6750GE and a HBA for 6G and 12G SAS each.
In all honesty, you should look for something in the R730 series, get a small formfactor machine so you can fit sata/Sas SSDs. It also has better processor support (v4 series Xeons) and DDR 4 support. I think that the x30 series are the first dell servers to support PCIE bifurcation which makes it super easy to add NVME drives via a PCIe card.
It's perfect! Have fun.
If you are wanting to do a VMware lab with a vCenter management server than it’s not too bad on overkill since vCenter will take 14+gb ram on its own, but if you wanna do something like Proxmox it will take you a while to use all those resources.
Either way it’s not super overkill if you are wanting to setup a lab to simulate a production vm farm setup, but if you are just wanting some things for the house than I’d recommend something like a HP Z420 or a Dell R320 with 32-96gb ram
Im gonna get hate for this but ... I made the choice three times now to go consumer garde for my homelab (except for SSDs and HDDs naturally).
A used 5900 will use next to no electricity when idling, it's so much easier to keep whisper quiet & in most cases much faster than those two Xeons. Plus I can easily fit my HDDs on rubber adapters (with fans) in 5.25" bays (I hate HDD cages/bays/caddies).
... sure, I have a backup server rather than built-in redundancy & no ECC, but what is one restart per year anyway. Perhaps the biggest difference is memory lanes, but I would never saturate them in my use cases.
Also easier to RGB all the things this way (I'm joking).
Just get a 1L pc to start with and put 32gb ram in there. Make sure to get 8th gen cpu or newer (7th Gen 7500 processor is also fine, but don't get anything slower)
All you need is a NUC running ESXi lol
My core i7 64GB NUC from 2019 has been doing great and isn’t seen on the electric bill or in my office. Get a little 4 bay QNAP or Synology to practice with data stores.
If you're looking to get a real server you'll probably get more for your money on /r/homelabsales. There are some amazing deals at around the $300-400 price point with much more modern hardware than that dell.
Your local power company will definitely love you. Pro Tip: You can use it as a space heater and white noise machine.
Probably overkill, but look at that price!
In terms of starter rackmount this is a great one. I started with an R710 a few years ago as I needed more processing power than a traditional tower offers. Few years after that I got an R720 for work in my colo.
Two great servers!!!