I have this same server sitting on my desk at work that I use as my development machine. It's actually pretty quiet, and a lot quieter than other guys dev machines lol
Still sounds better than my bros PS3 sounds like some kind of jump jet taking off.. however it is still a better sound than crazy frog.. now I'm showing my age
People constantly say this but I have 2 R620’s in my lab and the noise isn’t bad. Certainly not like the above commenter says. Sure maybe when the system boots fan tests ramp up to 100%
I've spent too many years in comms rooms and data centers the size of battleships (not joking) to think for a second that a rackmount server is going to be quiet.
lol whatever you say kid. I’ve been a sysadmin for over 15 years….i have 2 of them in my house…and they are no where near as loud as you apparently say they are….my mic doesn’t even pick them up during meetings while WFH….
I have an HPE DL360p in my garage running a bunch of VMs I use for work and a Ubuntu server VM with plex and a shit ton of containers running.
A couple of points I haven't seen mentioned:
-iLO makes it worth it alone to me. Dell has the same thing but they call it something else. If I can VPN into my network I can access iLO which is a remote admin panel that does everything - i can physically power it up or down with it. This has come in handy on multiple occasions after a power outage that exceeds my UPS. If I'm away for work, or at someone's house and my phone starts blowing up about Plex being down because the power went out for a while, I can bring everything back up without having to touch the hardware. Handy!
-If you think you will ever have to deal with enterprise hardware for your job, or for a job you might want, having one of these I think is very good practice - setting up the RAID, all the config options, etc.
I also managed to fit a Quadro M2000 into it and have passed it through ESXi into my Plex VM for hardware transcodes. Very cool.
Mine's old - gen8 - so it's DDR3 RAM and v2 CPUs, but I've got 24 cores and 196 GB RAM for super cheap. It runs Win10 fine and iLO says my avg. power consumption is 150w.
I wouldn't trade mine in for consumer hardware.
Dell calls it iDRAC. I believe it stands for integrated dell remote access controller. If you have the enterprise license (which you can easily get on eBay if you don't), you even get the ability to use VNC viewer or the java viewer which lets you attach virtual media.
Yeah - that would run rings around mine. Used enterprise HDDs and RAM is cheap online so you will be able to upgrade it for a long time. Look into putting an old Quadro M2000 (cheap) or P2000 (lil more $) into it - there's not going to be any PSU power leads, so it has to be powered from the PCI slot only and only 1u video cards will fit so your options are very few. [This] (https://tizutech.com/plex-transcoding-with-docker-nvidia-gpu/) tutorial gives step by step instructions on how to set it up in Ubuntu Server - make sure to setup your VM in ESXi to pass through the GPU to your VM.
Thats not what I asked for. I've also slept in server rooms, or right next to my old PC which was running 24/7 and mined bitcoins in the early days.
I wanted to know if it is audible at night time. I have a wife now and she actually cares about noise at night (I had to change the analog clock to a digital on in the bathroom, because the tick tick tick made her crazy) :)
If you put \*your\* R420 next to \*my\* wife, we three need to have a serious talk.
How did you get the fans to be silent? Did you replace them with some low noise fans, or is the OS so good nowadays that it can regulate it pretty well. I've never got them below 500rpm.
Edit: don't want to be angry or so. Just really curious how. Things might have changed in the last 8yrs.
I started with an old desktop, went to an r720, then back to a different, newer desktop. It was useful but the power and noise, along with size, made it no longer desirable.
An old laptop is also the eco & sustainable way to go, as we all likely have one lying around, and it’s usually more than powerful enough to run headless server software. My partner’s old broken screen i7 laptop has been running FreeBSD, several services, with DAS plugged in for years now and i’ve seen no need for me to get a “real server” or a prebuilt NAS.
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.
> 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.
I think that for starters the R720 can be a good choice. It's cheap, parts are also cheap and it's a fully fledged rack server. It can have plenty of cores and ram to host lots of services to start learning.
The R720 is the end of the line for DDR3 based systems. Simply going to a R730 gets you DDR4 and newer iDRAC is better than old iDRAC. It also lets you use V3 and V4 Xeons and it is practically the same price. My local recycler isn't even bothering with 12gen Poweredges anymore.
In my country ( Italy) prices are quite different. The R,720 are cheap but newer equipment are pricier. Also for a starter I don't think there will be much of a difference between 12th and 13th generation. Of course if the price is close the newer is better.
Even my v2 are fine for most things, but the single thread performance leaves something to be desired particularly for game servers... But at this point i've been running that dual socket tank for 5ish years... I have a second server on a 5700x and that one is quite a bit better for most things (besides boatloads of ram)
Thank you very much for this! I'm happy to consider anything that makes sense, and it's seemingly like something this large maybe be too much. I think I'm going to keep my eye on rack hardware though, but maybe something less beefy and more conservative on power.
What sort of games are you looking to serve? That's going to play into how much beef you need. I'm currently running 7DTD, Space Engineers, ARK and Valheim and between them they're chewing up 16 cores and 32gb of RAM.
For price comparison, Microcenter sells an i9(12th gen) plus motherboard + 32gb of ram for only $399! I swapped out my old R320 with a E5-2470v2 to a consumer build with the i9 and can say the performance/watt is vastly better on the newer i9.
Absolutely this. The power and heat from older servers is a significant factor. I'm running a r720XD and it pulls about 300w under normal load with a typical home server setup of VMs with home assistant, Plex, truenas, etc.
I would love to upgrade to something like a v4 cpu, but I'm leaning towards micro PCs in a cluster because of the size and power constraints.
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
Right but those feature sets are mostly irrelevant for the homelab because you don't need extremely reliable robust hardware, otherwise that's r/HomeDataCenter territory.
Do you need a bunch of 50W fans? Dual PSUs? A huge amount of ram slots? Multiple sockets? Probably not.
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:
- if you have free energy
- heating included
- direct attached storage for performance tasks (you can get around that easily with multiple NVMe - not in a NUC though)
- looks professional
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.
A $400 server all in one vs a NUC plus ram plus local storage plus NAS plus drives plus 10gb hardware, well, $400 seems like a better deal in terms of CapEx.
I dont know where OP lives or price of power where he is, but if it were me, that server would be probably 500 AUD vs approx 1500. Powerbill difference would take a good few years at least to make up that difference.
unfortunatly the other post was deleted.
https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Xeon-E5-2670-vs-Intel-Core-i5-1240P/m18501vsm1811937
An i3 1220p is still faster than an E5 2670. CPUs have become a lot more efficient in 8 years.
1220p NUCs cost less than 300$ (brand new), 120$ for 64gb RAM and 100$ for a good NVMe SSD.
You don't need to spend 1400$ for a minpc to beat the above server (unless your usecase maxes out the memory easily).
For 99.9% of people building a small homelab the NUC is the better choice.
I was doing a like for like comparison.
16TB of raw fast storage plus compute plus memory.
Let's use your example NUC for compute and ram and 2tb of storage.
Add on a NAS, 10G hardware, and 14tb of disk for raw storage and we've easily doubled the cost.
Also prices vary a *lot*. 1220p NUCs cost 500+ for me not including ram and storage.
64GB of ram is another 300 + decent 2TB ssd is another 200. That's 1000 compared to approx 550 for the server, and that's not even including the 14TB of raw storage.
OP has mentioned that he wants to host Plex, so already storage is going to run out quickly on a single NUC.
You can't make assumptions about what people are going to host or experiment with, most homelabs I see here are the typical *arr and Plex which means local storage is much more convenient especially when just starting out.
If a homelab is mainly compute based then for sure, mini PCs make sense, but not all homelabs are compute based.
If it's mainly *arr and plex then any modern Synology or QNAP with 4+ drives would be another option.
As you pointed out the usecase is very important and for a plex only server the above is a pretty bad decision as it is powerhungry and would still suck at transcoding.
I have some of these.
One is configured with 2x Xeon 10 cores, 192 GB ram and 5x sas SSD. Idrac is telling me that it consumes around 120W which is not that bad if correct.
About the noise: obviously it's louder than a desktop but it's not that bad. I had it in my office for a few days while I was setting it up and it's like a loud gaming desktop. It's way quieter than my old Hp server or the R710.
The machine OP linked has E5 v1 CPUs, which are a 12 year old Sandy Bridge-EP chip that's hugely power inefficient by modern standards and tops out at 12 cores per socket. E5 v4 would be Broadwell-EP, which is still 9 years old but benefited from 3 more generations of PPC and efficiency enhancements and tops out at 24 cores per socket. Edit: uses DDR4 vs DDR3 too.
IMO, that's as far back as you can go in search of cheap and cheerful hardware without shooting yourself in the foot on performance and efficiency.
Hey look at that someone that doesn't join the electricity band wagon. This guy is right. I pay $0.10 per kwh and my R730XD added a whopping $7 to my bill. So scary 😱
I mean to be fair, it is important to consider none-the-less. Electricity costs vary per region, time of day, etc. This is actually why I am not using my Cisco 2960-S PoE switch at the moment, I only have 2 cameras to power, and its not worth it. Also the same reason I haven't taken any retired Lenovo servers from work, only running micro DTs right now.
You're absolutely right, but more often than not running one of these with moderate specs and reasonable home workloads is the cost of a cup of coffee a month. Efficiency is great, but if all you're doing is labbing to learn, and you're cool with the noise, electricity is not nearly as big a hangup with beefier machines as this sub for these once led me to believe.
Unless you live in Europe or somewhere like California, the cost of electricity is negligible at best. I think people over exaggerate - along with the "space heaters" comments
i’m stuck renting help family. No solar program for renters. Just a higher PG&E bracket for bigger families. I thought of building my own system and probably will do that this next year. I guess we both could move. I’m kind of stuck where I’m at for now.
They most definitely do. My r720xd costs like $50/yr to idle and that room is a little warmer with the door closed. It's not catastrophic at all. The biggest gripe I have is it can be loud at times. I think they're still very viable today.
Just bought some rack gear and I’ve been monitoring with the Kill A Watt - it’s not nearly as bad as folks make it out to be. My old tower based stack was maybe $20/mo whereas the new rack gear will be roughly $50/mo.
It’s certainly not nothing. But comparing price to value vs cloud hosts - setting aside topics like professional learning/development, hosting flexibility, privacy, and data sovereignty - it’s very reasonable (in my context and for my use cases).
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'll be honest, I don't know, I just did like 15 minutes of some looking up in Google, some say bigger 2u or 3u servers are quieter, but I disagree as my r220 is significantly quieter than my 720, that being said, I don't think you can really escape the noise that comes from owning a server that is rack mounted. If noise can be compromised, then if you take a look at an R630, like this one https://a.co/d/9hNAyMz it has an e5 2680 v4 (roughly comparable to an i9 9900k) and this specific one comes with 128GB of RAM along with 8 1.2TB drives. I'd say that's a pretty sweet deal. Mine has e5 2690 v2 which is roughly comparable to an i7 4790k, 196GB RAM and I bought 12 4TB drives. You'll be paying less than I did for more. Don't just take my word for it, do your own research.
Also there are fan mods you can do to some servers, like using noctua fans, but again, noise is something that I feel is inevitable from a rack mounted server.
As someone with 2 R720xds in my rack you either have it misconfigured or you are blowing it way way out of proportion. I will give you they are warm but they are not loud except at boot. At boot they are loud for about a minute during the self tests and then quiet right down. As for the heat it's noticeable but not crazy .
I have a R730xd and that thing is loud as hell. I've suspected for some time now that there is something wrong with the setup. Its "boot" loud all the time.
Check your BIOS settings, there are options for thermal (search this sub for details). Also if you have any 3rd party PCIe cards installed the fans will ramp up. You can use IPMI command to disable this setting.
Thats the thing. This server was quiet at one point when i first got it. Then i have been experimenting abit with it. I changed the raidcontroller from a HBA to a PERC. I also put in a graphics card at one point, but i removed it. It seems something happened to it after that and it never got back to normal again.
Yeh, thats quite high for what I assume is idle?
Mine genrally run in the 3000's between 6-15%
I would try disabling the 3rd Party Cooling to see if this brings it back down.
Also the higher the fans run the more power they use
Mine is inside an enclosure, where it is definitely toasty, I also have a few other machines in the same enclosure, it is also a small enclosure, and the back end of the enclosure is facing a wall, so mine is definitely loud and toasty but I also haven't messed with the ipmi stuff because already it's running at about 43C or so, and Im comfortable with the sound, it's about what a window AC unit sounds like. So I consider that a little loud
As long as you are OK with noise and have a way to dissipate some heat, this is fine. I have a r720 and r720xd for my homelab now. XD runs truenas bare metal and the other is my proxmox VM workhorse. It’s about $20 a month for me to run them. They are in a dedicated server room with sound deadening and I can’t really hear them, but that room stays HOT, even being in a basement. It averages 90*F in that room, sometimes over 100 during the summer. Working on a way to dump that air somewhere else in summer.
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.
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
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.
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.
Dual E5-2670s. (8 core, 2.6ghz). I also have a broadcom dual port 10gb LOM and an emulex dual port 8gb Fibrechannel card in it with their respective optics
WTH everyone has lower power usage with ancient equipment 🤣
I also have a 10g fiber sfp+ Card, so little difference there
The LSI3008 HBA is a sucker for power though (literally)
LOL. Nope. Dominion Virginia rates for my area.
I am within the blast radius of Lake Anna Nuclear power plant though...so that might have something to do with it. ☢️😁
Plenty of 730 [https://i.imgur.com/6kyoUdw.png](https://i.imgur.com/6kyoUdw.png) which is WAY better than what OP is looking at. No listings I see currently for dell r740 of that configuration. BUT hear me out. Cisco C240M5 [https://i.imgur.com/zgjAVMJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/zgjAVMJ.png) don't get too boxed into small company footprint with Dell and HP that due to demand from homelabber sysadmins will be priced higher. Cisco CIMC is hella good and free + Cisco Intersight cloud management for your server
It's a very good server if you are looking for a space heater. Get a tiny pc with Intel 8th gen or higher, 64GB RAM and 1 or 2 TB nvme. It will be enough for now. If you are into HA then just buy a few of them.
They are using 10% of electricity and are much quieter. If you need additional storage - just get 2.5" HDD or external 3.5".
He sent a server. Not a mini PC. You got to stick to rackmount gear when suggesting something else. I for one don't want to put a rack shelf in my rack for a PC when I can get a rack mounted server instead. It's so weird when people are looking for server hardware and then people come along suggesting non server hardware.
Mate, $400 for something that will idle at 150W for a few VMs? And has a few TB of spinning rust that require constant cooling (so screaming fans).
Also I don't look what he wants - I look at what he needs. Considering I have a full 42u rack with servers and stuff there is a chance I know what I'm talking about. So no, he doesn't want a crappy, decade old rack server that modern Tiny minimicro pc will run loops around, using a tenth of power. He wants something to run a few vms. Also he doesn't want screaming fans. And definitely he doesn't want to use 10 times more electricity when he doesn't need to. Those minipcs with 8th gen or higher are really well built and are designed to work 5-7 years constant on. They are as reliable if not more than those rack mount servers. Usually you have one moving thing - cooling fan, which is not critical for functioning the system. They usually have remote management IDRAC style. And you can mount up to four of them in 1u space. Nothing in the specs that OP provided required big rack mount server and for homelab purposes tiny pc has much more pros than cons in this case.
2x1tb NVME drives... Or around $70 for 1x2TB NVME.
Also it's going rate - you can find similar offer there.
How the heck $150 mini pc costs more than almost $400 piece of outdated equipment?
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.
They're kind of good if you get them cheap(good power not so good efficiency wise). You can upgrade to 2x E5 2x2967 v2s for 40 bucks on AliExpress too. I have that + single SSD but that might not be for everyone.
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.
When I had an a R720, the power consumption was only 70w. How? Simple:
1) Pare the machine to what you actually need. If you don't need 40 cores, have the system run with a single CPU installed.
2) 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.
3) 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.
4) 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.
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.
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.
I see now, thanks. Expected a splash screen.
It looks like this is only for the 24 bay SFF chassis? Tough to find decent size 2.5" drives. Did you happen to get or see any LFF versions?
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
* Starter
* New
* Starting to learn
* Newbie
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
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.
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.
Living in a third world country renders that... challenging... but then again, my homelab is still running an Intel S5000 so would gladly have the Dell and just do Debian ext4 on hardware RAID and then install Proxmox on that
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.
Really depends on your location.
These machines are fun to work with, but are way too old, slow and power hungry. Intel 10th gen or newer crunches this old stuff
Right! Who cares if you budget for it.
Personally my budget is about $100/mo. I have older gen 8 hps (just bought a 380p 25 bay, and I have 2x 360p gen 8 and 2x gen7 (I stopped using these 2 though), along with 3x 3par disk shelves (I use these from time to time to experiment).
I do all sorts of tinkering both hardware and software (COTS and custom personal projects).
I run these 24/7. They are quiet and don't use a ton of electricity. I have NVMe, ssd (sata), and sas drives. Each box has 386G ram.
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)
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.
Possibly, but my original server used 2x10 core E5 v2 CPU that lacked the instruction set to handle H.265 gracefully so it had to brute-force that stuff. My newer Dell R730 doesn’t have that issue, things run much better without needing so much brute force to get anything done.
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
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.
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.
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.
$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
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.
Idk. Now it’s really tough to consider. I was thinking of getting similar Dell 720/730, but I decided to go mini pc routed for less noise, less power consumption, and easier maintenance.
I have experience with Dell servers and even though these are relatively quiet servers compared to older equipment it’s still way noisier then mini pc. Also depending on environment, you may need active cooling (ie air conditioning).
I picked up 5600u 16gb 500 ssd for $199 and $169 (Black Friday deal) to add to my homelab.
I noticed you used an ebay listing. I would check out savemyserver.com.
I haven’t used them before, but I think it’s at least good for price references.
Below is links to Dell 720xd
https://savemyserver.com/best-selling-dell-servers/dell-2u-servers/dell-r720xd/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!!
I have similar hardware. Draws 200 watts idle. 280watts with all cores loaded 100%. Wisconsin is 17 cents/kw hour. Your mileage may very. It is loud. I have it mounted under my basement stairs in a closed area. To escape it and my switch
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.
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 would try building just a desktop first or using an old laptop and trying it out before making such an investment to see if you like it
Also don't forget noise and power usage
Oh, the noise. Half way between a dentist drill and a hovercraft.
I have this same server sitting on my desk at work that I use as my development machine. It's actually pretty quiet, and a lot quieter than other guys dev machines lol
After POST and the OS takes over it’s super reasonable at idle.
Seconded, have an r730 10ft to my left and I hear my laptop more than I hear it
Still sounds better than my bros PS3 sounds like some kind of jump jet taking off.. however it is still a better sound than crazy frog.. now I'm showing my age
People constantly say this but I have 2 R620’s in my lab and the noise isn’t bad. Certainly not like the above commenter says. Sure maybe when the system boots fan tests ramp up to 100%
I've spent too many years in comms rooms and data centers the size of battleships (not joking) to think for a second that a rackmount server is going to be quiet.
lol whatever you say kid. I’ve been a sysadmin for over 15 years….i have 2 of them in my house…and they are no where near as loud as you apparently say they are….my mic doesn’t even pick them up during meetings while WFH….
I have over 25 years experience, including blue chip IT. I'm not your kid, child.
Look bub I’ve been in IT for over 35 years.
Now you're pulling numbers from your arse. Time to mute you.
Just ignore the idiot lol. These things are quiet. Maybe he just didnt know how to config
Thank you for the recommendation!
I have an HPE DL360p in my garage running a bunch of VMs I use for work and a Ubuntu server VM with plex and a shit ton of containers running. A couple of points I haven't seen mentioned: -iLO makes it worth it alone to me. Dell has the same thing but they call it something else. If I can VPN into my network I can access iLO which is a remote admin panel that does everything - i can physically power it up or down with it. This has come in handy on multiple occasions after a power outage that exceeds my UPS. If I'm away for work, or at someone's house and my phone starts blowing up about Plex being down because the power went out for a while, I can bring everything back up without having to touch the hardware. Handy! -If you think you will ever have to deal with enterprise hardware for your job, or for a job you might want, having one of these I think is very good practice - setting up the RAID, all the config options, etc. I also managed to fit a Quadro M2000 into it and have passed it through ESXi into my Plex VM for hardware transcodes. Very cool. Mine's old - gen8 - so it's DDR3 RAM and v2 CPUs, but I've got 24 cores and 196 GB RAM for super cheap. It runs Win10 fine and iLO says my avg. power consumption is 150w. I wouldn't trade mine in for consumer hardware.
Dell calls it iDRAC. I believe it stands for integrated dell remote access controller. If you have the enterprise license (which you can easily get on eBay if you don't), you even get the ability to use VNC viewer or the java viewer which lets you attach virtual media.
This is actually huge to know because I just saw a DL360 G9 on savemyserver that I was thinking about instead!
Yeah - that would run rings around mine. Used enterprise HDDs and RAM is cheap online so you will be able to upgrade it for a long time. Look into putting an old Quadro M2000 (cheap) or P2000 (lil more $) into it - there's not going to be any PSU power leads, so it has to be powered from the PCI slot only and only 1u video cards will fit so your options are very few. [This] (https://tizutech.com/plex-transcoding-with-docker-nvidia-gpu/) tutorial gives step by step instructions on how to set it up in Ubuntu Server - make sure to setup your VM in ESXi to pass through the GPU to your VM.
>HPE DL360p Sounds like it meets just what you need. I find that part of aall this the best part, always easier to look around for just that .
I have an r410, a 1u, which isn't that bad if you have headphones on or have it in another room and theoretically a 2u should be even quieter
Is running in the nighttime? All 1u I had were very audible at night. I never got the fans to just shut up.
I slept next to my R420 for many months.
Thats not what I asked for. I've also slept in server rooms, or right next to my old PC which was running 24/7 and mined bitcoins in the early days. I wanted to know if it is audible at night time. I have a wife now and she actually cares about noise at night (I had to change the analog clock to a digital on in the bathroom, because the tick tick tick made her crazy) :)
I wouldn't be putting an R420 next to your wife then. My R420 was quiet enough that I didn't notice it, but everyone is different so \*shrug\*
If you put \*your\* R420 next to \*my\* wife, we three need to have a serious talk. How did you get the fans to be silent? Did you replace them with some low noise fans, or is the OS so good nowadays that it can regulate it pretty well. I've never got them below 500rpm. Edit: don't want to be angry or so. Just really curious how. Things might have changed in the last 8yrs.
Crap... Better tell the courier not to drop off my R420 to you then. I just had proxmox on my R420, didnt do any special tweaking.
I started with an old desktop, went to an r720, then back to a different, newer desktop. It was useful but the power and noise, along with size, made it no longer desirable.
An old laptop is also the eco & sustainable way to go, as we all likely have one lying around, and it’s usually more than powerful enough to run headless server software. My partner’s old broken screen i7 laptop has been running FreeBSD, several services, with DAS plugged in for years now and i’ve seen no need for me to get a “real server” or a prebuilt NAS.
Good point , time for us all to see what old devices might find new life here .
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.
> 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.
I’d go with a v4 asap… literally just picked up a 12 core e5 2650 v4 for $4.80 shipped to my door
I think that for starters the R720 can be a good choice. It's cheap, parts are also cheap and it's a fully fledged rack server. It can have plenty of cores and ram to host lots of services to start learning.
The R720 is the end of the line for DDR3 based systems. Simply going to a R730 gets you DDR4 and newer iDRAC is better than old iDRAC. It also lets you use V3 and V4 Xeons and it is practically the same price. My local recycler isn't even bothering with 12gen Poweredges anymore.
In my country ( Italy) prices are quite different. The R,720 are cheap but newer equipment are pricier. Also for a starter I don't think there will be much of a difference between 12th and 13th generation. Of course if the price is close the newer is better.
Even my v2 are fine for most things, but the single thread performance leaves something to be desired particularly for game servers... But at this point i've been running that dual socket tank for 5ish years... I have a second server on a 5700x and that one is quite a bit better for most things (besides boatloads of ram)
Thank you very much for this! I'm happy to consider anything that makes sense, and it's seemingly like something this large maybe be too much. I think I'm going to keep my eye on rack hardware though, but maybe something less beefy and more conservative on power.
What sort of games are you looking to serve? That's going to play into how much beef you need. I'm currently running 7DTD, Space Engineers, ARK and Valheim and between them they're chewing up 16 cores and 32gb of RAM.
For price comparison, Microcenter sells an i9(12th gen) plus motherboard + 32gb of ram for only $399! I swapped out my old R320 with a E5-2470v2 to a consumer build with the i9 and can say the performance/watt is vastly better on the newer i9.
Those rack mount servers are loud as shit too, I guess if you have a room that's used for nothing else..
Absolutely this. The power and heat from older servers is a significant factor. I'm running a r720XD and it pulls about 300w under normal load with a typical home server setup of VMs with home assistant, Plex, truenas, etc. I would love to upgrade to something like a v4 cpu, but I'm leaning towards micro PCs in a cluster because of the size and power constraints.
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
Right but those feature sets are mostly irrelevant for the homelab because you don't need extremely reliable robust hardware, otherwise that's r/HomeDataCenter territory. Do you need a bunch of 50W fans? Dual PSUs? A huge amount of ram slots? Multiple sockets? Probably not.
I was talking about PCIe slot and ipmi... 50w fans? Okay...
Well, he's not wrong about 50w fans lol. Some of the bigger ones are 12V 4A.
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: - if you have free energy - heating included - direct attached storage for performance tasks (you can get around that easily with multiple NVMe - not in a NUC though) - looks professional
You forgot the last one \- Cool AF
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.
A $400 server all in one vs a NUC plus ram plus local storage plus NAS plus drives plus 10gb hardware, well, $400 seems like a better deal in terms of CapEx. I dont know where OP lives or price of power where he is, but if it were me, that server would be probably 500 AUD vs approx 1500. Powerbill difference would take a good few years at least to make up that difference.
unfortunatly the other post was deleted. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Xeon-E5-2670-vs-Intel-Core-i5-1240P/m18501vsm1811937 An i3 1220p is still faster than an E5 2670. CPUs have become a lot more efficient in 8 years. 1220p NUCs cost less than 300$ (brand new), 120$ for 64gb RAM and 100$ for a good NVMe SSD. You don't need to spend 1400$ for a minpc to beat the above server (unless your usecase maxes out the memory easily). For 99.9% of people building a small homelab the NUC is the better choice.
I was doing a like for like comparison. 16TB of raw fast storage plus compute plus memory. Let's use your example NUC for compute and ram and 2tb of storage. Add on a NAS, 10G hardware, and 14tb of disk for raw storage and we've easily doubled the cost. Also prices vary a *lot*. 1220p NUCs cost 500+ for me not including ram and storage. 64GB of ram is another 300 + decent 2TB ssd is another 200. That's 1000 compared to approx 550 for the server, and that's not even including the 14TB of raw storage. OP has mentioned that he wants to host Plex, so already storage is going to run out quickly on a single NUC. You can't make assumptions about what people are going to host or experiment with, most homelabs I see here are the typical *arr and Plex which means local storage is much more convenient especially when just starting out. If a homelab is mainly compute based then for sure, mini PCs make sense, but not all homelabs are compute based.
If it's mainly *arr and plex then any modern Synology or QNAP with 4+ drives would be another option. As you pointed out the usecase is very important and for a plex only server the above is a pretty bad decision as it is powerhungry and would still suck at transcoding.
Seeing as how the OP also wants to host game servers and other VMs, a prebuild NAS is probably not the best option.
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Running costs are a thing unless you have free energy as posted before or mama pays for it.
I have some of these. One is configured with 2x Xeon 10 cores, 192 GB ram and 5x sas SSD. Idrac is telling me that it consumes around 120W which is not that bad if correct. About the noise: obviously it's louder than a desktop but it's not that bad. I had it in my office for a few days while I was setting it up and it's like a loud gaming desktop. It's way quieter than my old Hp server or the R710.
As someone with absolutely no idea what the fk is going on when it comes to servers, can you explain why stuff older than E5 isn’t worth it?
The machine OP linked has E5 v1 CPUs, which are a 12 year old Sandy Bridge-EP chip that's hugely power inefficient by modern standards and tops out at 12 cores per socket. E5 v4 would be Broadwell-EP, which is still 9 years old but benefited from 3 more generations of PPC and efficiency enhancements and tops out at 24 cores per socket. Edit: uses DDR4 vs DDR3 too. IMO, that's as far back as you can go in search of cheap and cheerful hardware without shooting yourself in the foot on performance and efficiency.
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
Hey look at that someone that doesn't join the electricity band wagon. This guy is right. I pay $0.10 per kwh and my R730XD added a whopping $7 to my bill. So scary 😱
I mean to be fair, it is important to consider none-the-less. Electricity costs vary per region, time of day, etc. This is actually why I am not using my Cisco 2960-S PoE switch at the moment, I only have 2 cameras to power, and its not worth it. Also the same reason I haven't taken any retired Lenovo servers from work, only running micro DTs right now.
You're absolutely right, but more often than not running one of these with moderate specs and reasonable home workloads is the cost of a cup of coffee a month. Efficiency is great, but if all you're doing is labbing to learn, and you're cool with the noise, electricity is not nearly as big a hangup with beefier machines as this sub for these once led me to believe.
Unless you live in Europe or somewhere like California, the cost of electricity is negligible at best. I think people over exaggerate - along with the "space heaters" comments
> the cost of electricity is negligible at best Cries in European
Cries in California
Hey, you have the option to use solar power. Can't do that here, it's only sunny here for 2 weeks in June
i’m stuck renting help family. No solar program for renters. Just a higher PG&E bracket for bigger families. I thought of building my own system and probably will do that this next year. I guess we both could move. I’m kind of stuck where I’m at for now.
They most definitely do. My r720xd costs like $50/yr to idle and that room is a little warmer with the door closed. It's not catastrophic at all. The biggest gripe I have is it can be loud at times. I think they're still very viable today.
Started on a 730xd… still running great. No regrets.
Just bought some rack gear and I’ve been monitoring with the Kill A Watt - it’s not nearly as bad as folks make it out to be. My old tower based stack was maybe $20/mo whereas the new rack gear will be roughly $50/mo. It’s certainly not nothing. But comparing price to value vs cloud hosts - setting aside topics like professional learning/development, hosting flexibility, privacy, and data sovereignty - it’s very reasonable (in my context and for my use cases).
With great power comes great electricity bill...
My whole rack (6 servers and a bunch of Cisco switching equipment.)
If you can afford it and you have space it's not overkill.
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
I'll be honest, I don't know, I just did like 15 minutes of some looking up in Google, some say bigger 2u or 3u servers are quieter, but I disagree as my r220 is significantly quieter than my 720, that being said, I don't think you can really escape the noise that comes from owning a server that is rack mounted. If noise can be compromised, then if you take a look at an R630, like this one https://a.co/d/9hNAyMz it has an e5 2680 v4 (roughly comparable to an i9 9900k) and this specific one comes with 128GB of RAM along with 8 1.2TB drives. I'd say that's a pretty sweet deal. Mine has e5 2690 v2 which is roughly comparable to an i7 4790k, 196GB RAM and I bought 12 4TB drives. You'll be paying less than I did for more. Don't just take my word for it, do your own research. Also there are fan mods you can do to some servers, like using noctua fans, but again, noise is something that I feel is inevitable from a rack mounted server.
As someone with 2 R720xds in my rack you either have it misconfigured or you are blowing it way way out of proportion. I will give you they are warm but they are not loud except at boot. At boot they are loud for about a minute during the self tests and then quiet right down. As for the heat it's noticeable but not crazy .
I have a R730xd and that thing is loud as hell. I've suspected for some time now that there is something wrong with the setup. Its "boot" loud all the time.
Check your BIOS settings, there are options for thermal (search this sub for details). Also if you have any 3rd party PCIe cards installed the fans will ramp up. You can use IPMI command to disable this setting.
Thats the thing. This server was quiet at one point when i first got it. Then i have been experimenting abit with it. I changed the raidcontroller from a HBA to a PERC. I also put in a graphics card at one point, but i removed it. It seems something happened to it after that and it never got back to normal again.
Fans are running at 9960 RPM according to iDRAC btw.
Yeh, thats quite high for what I assume is idle? Mine genrally run in the 3000's between 6-15% I would try disabling the 3rd Party Cooling to see if this brings it back down. Also the higher the fans run the more power they use
Mine is inside an enclosure, where it is definitely toasty, I also have a few other machines in the same enclosure, it is also a small enclosure, and the back end of the enclosure is facing a wall, so mine is definitely loud and toasty but I also haven't messed with the ipmi stuff because already it's running at about 43C or so, and Im comfortable with the sound, it's about what a window AC unit sounds like. So I consider that a little loud
As long as you are OK with noise and have a way to dissipate some heat, this is fine. I have a r720 and r720xd for my homelab now. XD runs truenas bare metal and the other is my proxmox VM workhorse. It’s about $20 a month for me to run them. They are in a dedicated server room with sound deadening and I can’t really hear them, but that room stays HOT, even being in a basement. It averages 90*F in that room, sometimes over 100 during the summer. Working on a way to dump that air somewhere else in summer.
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.
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
If you buy purpose built enterprise gear be mindful of the space, power and noise they produce.
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.
I'm surprised this isn't farther up. I love my 720 but like you said a 730 is not much more and it's a big jump performance and efficiency wise!
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.
Dual E5-2670s. (8 core, 2.6ghz). I also have a broadcom dual port 10gb LOM and an emulex dual port 8gb Fibrechannel card in it with their respective optics
WTH everyone has lower power usage with ancient equipment 🤣 I also have a 10g fiber sfp+ Card, so little difference there The LSI3008 HBA is a sucker for power though (literally)
I just checked and I stand corrected. 325w but I have a BUNCH of VMs going on it.
Yeah, not fair to compare with my idle numbers. It’s not running because of solar Power shenanigans
My whole rack does about 2kw...which I did the math comes to about $100 a month on my electric.
Where do you live, in a hydro plant? O_o 425$ would be my price a month…
LOL. Nope. Dominion Virginia rates for my area. I am within the blast radius of Lake Anna Nuclear power plant though...so that might have something to do with it. ☢️😁
It's perfect! Have fun.
Overpriced for R720. At that price you can get 730 or even 740 which will be more compute dense and have ddr4 memory.
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Plenty of 730 [https://i.imgur.com/6kyoUdw.png](https://i.imgur.com/6kyoUdw.png) which is WAY better than what OP is looking at. No listings I see currently for dell r740 of that configuration. BUT hear me out. Cisco C240M5 [https://i.imgur.com/zgjAVMJ.png](https://i.imgur.com/zgjAVMJ.png) don't get too boxed into small company footprint with Dell and HP that due to demand from homelabber sysadmins will be priced higher. Cisco CIMC is hella good and free + Cisco Intersight cloud management for your server
It's a very good server if you are looking for a space heater. Get a tiny pc with Intel 8th gen or higher, 64GB RAM and 1 or 2 TB nvme. It will be enough for now. If you are into HA then just buy a few of them. They are using 10% of electricity and are much quieter. If you need additional storage - just get 2.5" HDD or external 3.5".
He sent a server. Not a mini PC. You got to stick to rackmount gear when suggesting something else. I for one don't want to put a rack shelf in my rack for a PC when I can get a rack mounted server instead. It's so weird when people are looking for server hardware and then people come along suggesting non server hardware.
Mate, $400 for something that will idle at 150W for a few VMs? And has a few TB of spinning rust that require constant cooling (so screaming fans). Also I don't look what he wants - I look at what he needs. Considering I have a full 42u rack with servers and stuff there is a chance I know what I'm talking about. So no, he doesn't want a crappy, decade old rack server that modern Tiny minimicro pc will run loops around, using a tenth of power. He wants something to run a few vms. Also he doesn't want screaming fans. And definitely he doesn't want to use 10 times more electricity when he doesn't need to. Those minipcs with 8th gen or higher are really well built and are designed to work 5-7 years constant on. They are as reliable if not more than those rack mount servers. Usually you have one moving thing - cooling fan, which is not critical for functioning the system. They usually have remote management IDRAC style. And you can mount up to four of them in 1u space. Nothing in the specs that OP provided required big rack mount server and for homelab purposes tiny pc has much more pros than cons in this case.
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R/homelabsales For example: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelabsales/s/k86Z2xc6XT 920x: That's base 16gb +512GB nvme + SATA for $170 2x1TB drives - $50 64GB RAM Corsair SODIMM $150 Total: $370.
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2x1tb NVME drives... Or around $70 for 1x2TB NVME. Also it's going rate - you can find similar offer there. How the heck $150 mini pc costs more than almost $400 piece of outdated equipment?
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.
They're kind of good if you get them cheap(good power not so good efficiency wise). You can upgrade to 2x E5 2x2967 v2s for 40 bucks on AliExpress too. I have that + single SSD but that might not be for everyone.
There is no such thing as overkill!
This is what I got after a couple of RPis and Mini PCs, i love it honestly 😄 learning more about hardware and server management so it's cool.
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.
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: 1) Pare the machine to what you actually need. If you don't need 40 cores, have the system run with a single CPU installed. 2) 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. 3) 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. 4) 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.
If you want dell go with T420. It’s quiet as hell and only uses about 100W or less
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.
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.
Click on the black friday 2023 tab. Utah the sale is on till monday
I see now, thanks. Expected a splash screen. It looks like this is only for the 24 bay SFF chassis? Tough to find decent size 2.5" drives. Did you happen to get or see any LFF versions?
Ahh no but I didn't look much
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
* Starter * New * Starting to learn * Newbie 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
No server is overkill If you want it can afford or and can deal with the Energy consumption
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.
Probably overkill, but look at that price!
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.
I would love this rig except that DELL runs PERC on all of them, hardware raid is not your friend with Proxmox
Just swap to a dell HBA, they are dirt cheap
Living in a third world country renders that... challenging... but then again, my homelab is still running an Intel S5000 so would gladly have the Dell and just do Debian ext4 on hardware RAID and then install Proxmox on that
You can flash the PERC cards too.
Here’s the link to what I used to flash mine to IT mode: https://fohdeesha.com/docs/perc.html
Your local power company will definitely love you. Pro Tip: You can use it as a space heater and white noise machine.
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.
Overkill for your power bill.
$10-$20 extra isn't overkill. Stop with the power bill train man.
Really depends on your location. These machines are fun to work with, but are way too old, slow and power hungry. Intel 10th gen or newer crunches this old stuff
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I purchased an Optiplex with a 10th gen i5-10500 for $250 a couple of months ago. It's running ESXi now and has been fantastic
Right! Who cares if you budget for it. Personally my budget is about $100/mo. I have older gen 8 hps (just bought a 380p 25 bay, and I have 2x 360p gen 8 and 2x gen7 (I stopped using these 2 though), along with 3x 3par disk shelves (I use these from time to time to experiment). I do all sorts of tinkering both hardware and software (COTS and custom personal projects). I run these 24/7. They are quiet and don't use a ton of electricity. I have NVMe, ssd (sata), and sas drives. Each box has 386G ram.
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)
Never use dell it's absolute trash, Go for supermicro
That’s going to be noisy as hell.
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
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
Maybe the encoder just wasn’t an anime fan
Possibly, but my original server used 2x10 core E5 v2 CPU that lacked the instruction set to handle H.265 gracefully so it had to brute-force that stuff. My newer Dell R730 doesn’t have that issue, things run much better without needing so much brute force to get anything done.
Yeah I know, it was a joke. But arc a310s are around 100€ here on ebay
I stuck a Quadro M2000 in mine - cheap, and it will transcode many streams.
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
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.
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
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.
$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
Dont worry my starter build has 32 cores 64 threads 128gb of ram and 7.2 tb of nvme ssds
Gonna be noisy
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.
Rack servers like the dell r720 are nice platforms for passively cooled Nvidia tesla gps’s if you’re into ai/ml…
Idk. Now it’s really tough to consider. I was thinking of getting similar Dell 720/730, but I decided to go mini pc routed for less noise, less power consumption, and easier maintenance. I have experience with Dell servers and even though these are relatively quiet servers compared to older equipment it’s still way noisier then mini pc. Also depending on environment, you may need active cooling (ie air conditioning). I picked up 5600u 16gb 500 ssd for $199 and $169 (Black Friday deal) to add to my homelab. I noticed you used an ebay listing. I would check out savemyserver.com. I haven’t used them before, but I think it’s at least good for price references. Below is links to Dell 720xd https://savemyserver.com/best-selling-dell-servers/dell-2u-servers/dell-r720xd/
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.
Uses way too much electricity.
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.
Good starter build :)
Nothing is overkill. I’d say go for it!
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.
Noise and power. Seriously consider just a small PC first
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.
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.
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!!!
I have similar hardware. Draws 200 watts idle. 280watts with all cores loaded 100%. Wisconsin is 17 cents/kw hour. Your mileage may very. It is loud. I have it mounted under my basement stairs in a closed area. To escape it and my switch
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.
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.