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!
I have been thinking about this myself.
The question I have is there any reason to get a rack server?
Also, would it make sense to get multiple and put them in a cluster?
Are any rackmount servers low power? or is this just an unrealistic expectation.
Honestly I’ve been finding used workstations to be amazing starters and even for light to moderate compute nodes,
My goto currently is the Lenovo p520 they run usually around $200 kitted out and come with usually a skylake xeon workstation cpu and are nearly dead silent.
Look at getting one with no drives and filling it up with SSDs. Uses less electricity.
Personal experience here - had both and the fan noise on these is nuts
You can write a script to control the fans.
I got a r310 and I don’t power it on often much. I use it for personal databases but I plan to do something else with it.
If your are a shareholder at your local power provider... Or just recicle some hardware lying around any PC, laptop ou small form factor would do the job without a portion of the noise or power consumption, just a guy that runs a similar setup once a week as a redundant backup.
It’s cheap because you will pay with the power bill.
When I had an a R720, the power consumption was only 70w. How? Simple:
Pare the machine to what you actually need. If you don't need 40 cores, have the system run with a single CPU installed.
Look at the how much memory is really been used. To run Linux and various Linux VMs and even a Windows one, 32GB or 48GB can go a long ways. If you load it with 384GB, great, but there will be a power penalty.
BIOS Performance settings make a huge difference. Setting the machine to max performance will disable C states and makes for a slightly faster but very loud and power hungry server.
Take advantage of power savings. Have the RAID controller spin down HDDs that are not being access. Energize only a single PS to cut another 10-12W off the usage.
$400 for that seems steep. Go look for an HP Z440 workstation as cheap as possible and upgrade it. A 12 core E5 v4 cpu is literally $5 and you should be able to pickup a chassis with cpu and like 8gb ram for ~$120. Then for $10 a stick but as many 16gb ddr4 ecc dimms as you want.
For $400 or less you could get 12 much faster newer cores, a basically silent workstation that idles under 100w and 192gb ddr4
If you want dell go with T420. It’s quiet as hell and only uses about 100W or less
Dont worry my starter build has 32 cores 64 threads 128gb of ram and 7.2 tb of nvme ssds
Never use dell it's absolute trash,
Go for supermicro
Savemyserver is having a black friday sale today. I just bought a 730xd off there for 280$ and a ram upgrade to 128GB for 100$ so newer hardware with comparable memory and a better upgrade path for almost the same price. I'd recommend checking them out.
Is that sale still going on or was it one day?
Pricing out a 730xd on their site now starts at $680.
Unless you get your power for free (or a free rack server), you’d be better off just building a tower to start with more modern, power efficient parts.
Also, you didn’t mention if you had a rack, if you don’t, definitely avoid rack mount servers for now.
Do you have a workload planned for that? Like everyone told you here, it's a powerful beast but you need to feed it. If you're planning to run a plex container and a file share, it's an overkill. Get a power efficient optiplex, or hp prodesk/elitedesk, or Lenovo Thinkcentre. Put all the ram you can, a fast SSD and a big HDD for storage, you'll be more than content, and without the guilt of killing 5 whales each time you read a pr0n file.
i just got one as an upgrade from my old desktop, i love it! little loud on startup but with 20+ services and 4 vms running it’s stays quiet, and it’s only using 168w
Rack servers like the dell r720 are nice platforms for passively cooled Nvidia tesla gps’s if you’re into ai/ml…
There is no such thing as overkill. You need for reasons!!
It’s not a lot of money for a whole lot of fun.
Ok it’s loud AF. So put it somewhere you can’t hear it.
It also uses a LOT of electricity… so why not schedule uptime and have it shut off when you’re not using it? (Remember even at idle it’s prob using 120 watts).
I think having this is as much about the learning experience.
All keywords that highlight why all you need is to find some free hardware to get you going, and look to buy when you have a bit more if a grasp on what your requirements are
Don't make the same mistake that so many of us did. Don't start with Enterprise hardware. It's not made for us, put this $400 into some half decent consumer hardware from eBay.
No server is overkill If you want it can afford or and can deal with the Energy consumption
It's a really good starter kit as it will quickly teach you to choose the next hardware properly, i.e. to balance the need for cpu power, ram, hdd sizes with the power consumption cost.
Nothing is overkill. I’d say go for it!
I have 3 servers. 2 R620 and 1 R630. The fans are loud before post but after they are quite quiet.
I have them in my garage so noise/heat is not an issue for me nor it the power consumption. If I were in EU that would be a different conversation.
I run Proxmox on them in a cluster and nested 7 ESXi “servers” along with a bunch of other LXCs and VMs. I don’t think it’s a huge investment for less than $400. You could flash that H710p to IT mode and have the TruNas ( or any other one ) manage your HDDs.
Also at the same time reduce the fan speed.
You can have so much fun and functionality with it.
Keep in mind the everything resides on 1 physical server and you will not have any redundancy.
However, Proxmox, ESXi and the like need at least 2(+ witnesses) or 3 to allow you High Availability ( HA ) and to be able to move your VMs.
Having 1 hypervisor on the bare bones and nesting ( installing other Hypervisors) under it you could create a hell of a lab.
Well, R720 is quite old. I would look into R730/R630 options. Or ideally, use some hardware that you already have. An old laptop with Proxmox might very well be a start.
I asked the same and was met with a lot of “do it in a laptop first”. Ended up buying a r730 for $350.
Also everyone saying this thing would be an aircraft in terms of noise and heat. Its running quieter than my main pc or a regular ceiling fan. The fans stay around 5% unless you’re booting it. (Look up idrac fan control). Its uses more power than a laptop, though. Averages at 73w. I’m very happy with it. Running LXCs under proxmox with jellyfin, arrs, pihole, truenas, tailscale/cloudflare and some other random VMs for fun.
Good starter build :)
I would go for an old pc or just an intel nuc with proxmox to start. Calculate the power costs for a server like this before you buy it. Also they can be REALLY loud
I would love this rig except that DELL runs PERC on all of them, hardware raid is not your friend with Proxmox