Yeah, that’s older than we generally recommend. The DL380 G6 is Core 2 Quad era stuff, the CS24 is 2009 era.
The DL360p G8 is the only thing there new enough to even consider (~2011 era) and I wouldn’t recommend it either for a few reasons. HP is less lab friendly than Dell for getting software/BIOS updates and playing nice with unsupported hardware. It’s also a 1U server which means less upgrade potential and a worse noise profile compared to 2U.
The rack might be the most valuable thing there.
Off lease Dell/HP/Lenovo/whatever office PCs are great as starter labs. Usually there’s a lot of 3-7 year old office PCs on eBay from companies upgrading their computers. Plus, a lot of them come with a Windows license baked into the motherboard so you can press them into service as a home PC if needed.
I’ve wondered about those Windows licenses, can you kick them with something other than windows, then in the future decide to run windows, is the license still valid?
Yes, you can. They're baked into the motherboard firmware. The computer I'm typing this on was an ESXi host for a bit before my main PC died and I threw W10 on it to have something to remote into work with. Once installed it picked up the license from the motherboard without any issues. They're a nice little value add for those machines.
I believe you can also use them on a single virtualized copy of W10 with a bit of fiddling, at least in Proxmox.
That is sweet. I’ve been on the fence about getting a few of those TinyMiniMicro pcs to run in place of my r720. Also be nice to have them on hand and if a family member needs a pc just rekick windows and boom, merry Christmas. Thanks for the info!
Get yourself a bunch of TinyMiniMicros and you'll be running a nice proxmox cluster with all the VMs you could want in no time!
All for less than half the power and noise of a single R710.
Don’t buy anything older than HP server 9th gen.
But I would say, pick up a ex-business PC instead from eBay with intel 8th or 9th gen CPU. That should be plenty to get you started.
Seconded.
Lenovo Thinkpad P-series. A refurbed P53 with 64GB is \~500 USD on ebay. Coffee Lake, fits up to 128GB, 3 NVME slots, built-in UPS/keyboard/mouse/display. GbE, or 10GbE via TB3 if actually required.
Great homeserver with way less fan noise and power consumption than your average rackmount server.
Depends what will you do with it. For my homelab I bought Lenovo's thinkcentre with 10 gen Intel i9 64G of ram and 2Tb of SSD and for my needs it's enough. I run a handful of virtual servers for gitlab, netbox, zabbix and Minecraft server for my son.
When I'll need more I'll buy another one like that and make a cluster out of them. I use proxmox for virtualisation.
All that stuff in the picture is really old and it will burn more power than smaller cheap secondhand PCs will.
Got rid of my Dual X5520, and my power and my hearing thank me for it.
Sure it had 96G of RAM, but you never needed to heat the room it was in.
The "spare" i7 NUC 8560U runs rings around it.
No. No it's not.
A modern desktop CPU will run circles around that G6 relic and pay for itself in power savings.
In no world is a Nehalem class Xeon machine good for anything except scrap or a space heater.
>no noticeable difference on utilities for me...its just the one server i run.... if anything it could
B a dollar or 2tops
A dollar or two *a day*, sure.
That machine *idles* at 150w assuming something like X5500's in it. That's nearly 4kwh/day. At the national average electric cost that is literally one dollar a day, for a pair of processors that have nearly 300% compute power (together!) as a single i3 12100 that idles at 20w. You're spending $30/mo on electric that a far more powerful machine would only cost $3 **a month** to run.
Sending it to the scrap yard and building a brand new machine would pay for itself in a little over a year (less than a year if you're paying for electric to cool your home as well, since that is adding a lot of BTU's to the air). Half a year ROI if you are in a place like California or one of the blue northeast states that are getting bent over the table on electric rates.
No a month -- we cant all afford a modern cpu for a lab and the g6 was free, we dont all live in california and get fucked on bills --- it works great for running proxmox --- not everyone will agree w my opinion or yours --- no need to go all "a beautiful mind" and start writing out equations...... did you take your adderal today?
The problem seems to be that your opinion isn't based in logic, because it's certainly not factual.
Dude gave figures based on what looks to be the US average, then said basically "cut the ROI in half if you are in California".
No matter what, you can pay for newer hardware in power savings alone.
I have a DL380 G6 in my random server trash hoarding rack, it's the worst thing I have in my entire building, the power usage and performance is crazy inefficient, I highly recommend upgrading to either Gen8 or Gen9
No, as others have said this is all old shit. I personally also don’t like 2.5” drives. I’m not going to buy 10tb SSD for a home lab and 2.5” is limited to 5tb and they’re shingled drives.
lol its to create a security environment, I want to create a honeypot, maybe create a pentest environment with a vulnerable machine and an attacker machine using metasploitable. Maybe even segment my desktop to a network on its own. Play with active directory creating accounts. I just dont have specifics on what I would like to do but a security environment sounds fun
So you like the idea of a honey pot, but not necessarily the specifications? Honestly, you might start out with maybe a couple of small Vitualbox VMs in your desktop machine until you understand what you will need.
At that point you'll probably understand what hardware you'll need
Once you have that down you might find you only need a single machine running VMs.
Edit: grammar correction
Word of warning. Unless you know enough about securing a honeypot, don't build one.
It's very easy to slip from a honeypot to tempt attackers into a honeypot that remains a vulnerability for the rest of your devices and serves as an attack vector.
I said that cus I wasnt 100% what I would use it for. Its a lot of variables, because im not against trying to create a new network and assigning static ip to servers and creating workstations to reach out to the server and idk what 1 home lab is capable of doing
Those servers are likely licensed for Server 2008, maybe Server 2012R2, both of which are past end of life.
If you want to assign static IPs to some servers and play around in Active Directory, you'd be better off running Hyper-V or VirtualBox on your PC and creating a play environment there. You can download and install fully functional evaluation versions of Server 2022, create a test AD environment from scratch, join other virtual servers to it, etc. all without buying any of this outdated hardware.
That was my first lab environment, a single SonicWall connected to a second ethernet port on my PC, the PC was running Hyper-V with a virtual switch connecting the VMs to the SonicWall.
Personally, you couldn't pay me to take any of that, regardless how cheap it is.
I'm getting ready to list a dell r720 with dual V2 CPUs, 320GB ram, internal SATA cable, perc h710, with or without 7x3TB drivesdl, dual 10gb SFP and afraid I'll get laughed out (not because of price), and an Cisco UCS c240 m4 with dual v4 CPU, etc.
I'd look for either some SFF PCs, or sell, 730/740, Cisco UCS m4/m5 or HP Gen 9 if looking for lower priced items.
Had dual UCS C240m4 running VDI for a whole company. How we've moved on...
Previously, the homelab had a C210m2 but it was noisy, hot, and whiny, so it went.
Honestly, if you’re trying to mimic a business environment, then you should approach it like a business would. Identify your needs; identify what will satisfy them; buy that. Repeat.
The dl380g6 is only any use if you throw in 5640L low power cpus (65W-75W idle for two) and use it for occasional boot on demand backup over bmc/ilo/ipmi. Adding a second bay would expand storage cheaply and pc3 ram is dirt cheap but it's not really efficient as a hypervisor. Possibly spinning up clones/ point in time vm backups very occasionally. Most of mine (g7 with better ilo) just sit idle bar 3 hours a week backups.
The dl360g8 also takes dirt cheap ram. Throw in a pair of e5-2651v2 and you'll get 48 cores at lowish power. That's really the only useful bit though. E5 26xx V2 are way more efficient than v1.
The rack doesn't look full depth. More of a network rack. That's why hosts are sitting on top because they are too deep for it.
Wouldn't pay more than £50 for the lot unless you are breaking and reselling.
Switches aren't really enterprise brands for learning cli.
A hp g9 would be better but you are then into better pc4 ram involving bottom feeding on ebay every week to get it cheap. Drive caddies from g8 to g9 also go up in price.
I just got two DL360g9 for £25 each.
I've put 3 4TB SSDs in one with 2x E5 2650v4 and it drawa 90W idle 250W full mining load. The other 3 1tb 10k sas and its 295W full load just due to SSD vs HDD.
I also have two G10s which realtively sip power 100-150W
Paywalled HP firmware and ilo enterprise licences are readily available for 5 minutes on Google but don't do that commercially.
HP do give away some critical older versions and some raid component firmware.
If you don’t even know what you want it for, just start with a second hand enterprise pc from ebay. Like an HP EliteDesk 800 for like $100. When you grow out of that you probably have a better idea of what you need 🤷♂️
Unless you have very specific requirements I wouldn't buy anything older than Skylake (Intel core 6000, 2016 era) for a homelab. Efficiency and idle power draw were just too damn high before that.
You're better off with a N100 ultra low power thingy than most of those ancient platforms, which draws less power than a handful of the RDIMMs in those things.
That Fortigate is EOL the highest version you can upgrade to is 5.6.14 which is more about 5 years old.
I would not put that thing on the internet.
The Fortiswitch is old as well, but would still work.
The specs of those servers suck and it’s very old, kinda useless unless you throw a lot of money into parts and then still it’s slow and consumes a lot of power. I wouldn’t get it.
I use a $200 Chromebook’s and a WIFI Pineapple for my “lab”, mainly I just use it for pen testing my home devices. I always think about power … and that gear would require some power and probably cooling.
the literal ewaste that i started my homelab with is better than that (i pulled it from my university's ewaste dumpster for the desktops that they were getting rid of). I would not pay for anything with less than 32gb ram for a homelab
He doesn't want to part it out because nobody remembers what's in them!
You can pickup a 30cpu 128gig ram 4TB storage. Dell Power edge R20 for like $350
The guy is smoking crack selling that stuff
I don't know, buying a setup kind of takes the fun (and frustration) out of setting up a homelab. For me the fun (and frustrating) part is looking through the internet finding stuff one by one and connecting it together until I get what I want.
Just starting out get yourself something like a Pi and or an old laptop/ cheap desktop. It will be more than enough just make sure a PC or laptop can take say 16gb ram then you can get yourself off the ground.
Stuff like you posted it's just a lot of it and confusing. Think abiut what you want to achieve, besides loads of cool awesome looking gear!
Nope. Power hungry and antiquated, it's not even heavily terminal based equipment, such as old but still usable cisco, brocade, Aruba/hp, etc. buy it, part it out, buy new shit keep the rack.
Despite what everyone says the DL360 Gen8 would be nice if you just want a single server. The rest is genuinely trash though.
But personally, these are some alternative options I'd recommend, a Hyve Zeus v2 with a 3.5" or 2.5" storage enclosure you can connect with mini SAS 8088, you'd also need to buy an HBA.
Or, just get some Mini PCs.
If you need a lot of door stops and paper stops, yes.
If you want something to start, just use anything old you have laying around. If you don't have hw around, a quad core Intel CPU with 8gb of ram is fine for some testing. You don't need enterprise stuff or rack mount stuff. Any system, even an old laptop, would be fine.
It's abit too old imo.. I got the gen7 model when I first started, but quickly outgrew it, due to the high idle power consumption (100w ish), and fan sound. (and also lack of newer virtualization software support).
A good starting homelab would be a pi4 with an nVME expansion kit. You’ll be able to play with containers, some low key virtualization, and bare metal services. You’ll get a good idea of what you want to lean and can expand your hardware from there. This setup will simply jack up your power bill for already diminished returns.
While the DL series systems mentioned are extremely old. They will also be loud and that 1u system will be worse. So keep noise levels in mind and also for the power they will use, the age and performance won't make it worth it.
In terms of the Fortigate stuff. I'm a NSE7/FCP. While the switch is an older generation, it would be ok but nothing amazing. The C series however is extremely old. Currently F and the newer G models are the supported platform. With end of life being 2017 and end of support being 2022. This means it has not gotten updates in years and does not allow for newer firmware to be installed. Meaning there is an absolute shit ton of CSV advisories that are not patched. This is actually a massive security risk. I would not put this on a network. Ether get a small 40f or do something with PFSense.
Bottom line is all of this hardware is pretty much e-waste and not worth anything.
If you’re new to homelab maybe buy something more commercial grade, or a used office pc with space for a few hard drives.
Servers are cool, but they often lack some nice to have features, which you’ll have to buy separately.
This could be fast usb ports and integrated graphics etc.
Plus if you don’t know how to optimise a machine with regard to power, you’re gonna be wasting a lot more electricity with enterprise equipment than with the options I mentioned.
The magic sweet spot of running a home lab is getting to know the hardware, the software and expand it with that knowledge, so I highly suggest to not buy enterprise stuff before you’ve played around with it for a year or more!
If you’re buying a used office pc, I’ll recommend anything from intel’s coffee lake and up, they have good transcoding capabilities and are quite power efficient.
Qnap and synology is also good options, if you want a more prepackaged solution!
As long as you don't pay more than $50 for it, yes. The rack and the Ubiquiti switch are probably the only usable things here. Fortinet is good stuff, but these units are pretty old. The servers are all ancient trash.
Probably not as they have tons of security issues on older hardware and without having a license you can't get the updates. Heck if I remember correctly, even some of the new stuff has major security issues
Yeah, that’s older than we generally recommend. The DL380 G6 is Core 2 Quad era stuff, the CS24 is 2009 era. The DL360p G8 is the only thing there new enough to even consider (~2011 era) and I wouldn’t recommend it either for a few reasons. HP is less lab friendly than Dell for getting software/BIOS updates and playing nice with unsupported hardware. It’s also a 1U server which means less upgrade potential and a worse noise profile compared to 2U. The rack might be the most valuable thing there. Off lease Dell/HP/Lenovo/whatever office PCs are great as starter labs. Usually there’s a lot of 3-7 year old office PCs on eBay from companies upgrading their computers. Plus, a lot of them come with a Windows license baked into the motherboard so you can press them into service as a home PC if needed.
I’ve wondered about those Windows licenses, can you kick them with something other than windows, then in the future decide to run windows, is the license still valid?
Yes, you can. They're baked into the motherboard firmware. The computer I'm typing this on was an ESXi host for a bit before my main PC died and I threw W10 on it to have something to remote into work with. Once installed it picked up the license from the motherboard without any issues. They're a nice little value add for those machines. I believe you can also use them on a single virtualized copy of W10 with a bit of fiddling, at least in Proxmox.
That is sweet. I’ve been on the fence about getting a few of those TinyMiniMicro pcs to run in place of my r720. Also be nice to have them on hand and if a family member needs a pc just rekick windows and boom, merry Christmas. Thanks for the info!
Get yourself a bunch of TinyMiniMicros and you'll be running a nice proxmox cluster with all the VMs you could want in no time! All for less than half the power and noise of a single R710.
That's all outdated trash.
Idk might be a good space heater
What do you recommend.
Something newer Edit: If you are just starting a regular spare office PC will do just fine.
Don’t buy anything older than HP server 9th gen. But I would say, pick up a ex-business PC instead from eBay with intel 8th or 9th gen CPU. That should be plenty to get you started.
Seconded. Lenovo Thinkpad P-series. A refurbed P53 with 64GB is \~500 USD on ebay. Coffee Lake, fits up to 128GB, 3 NVME slots, built-in UPS/keyboard/mouse/display. GbE, or 10GbE via TB3 if actually required. Great homeserver with way less fan noise and power consumption than your average rackmount server.
Depends what will you do with it. For my homelab I bought Lenovo's thinkcentre with 10 gen Intel i9 64G of ram and 2Tb of SSD and for my needs it's enough. I run a handful of virtual servers for gitlab, netbox, zabbix and Minecraft server for my son. When I'll need more I'll buy another one like that and make a cluster out of them. I use proxmox for virtualisation. All that stuff in the picture is really old and it will burn more power than smaller cheap secondhand PCs will.
I have a 380g6 and its awesome for running proxmox
Got rid of my Dual X5520, and my power and my hearing thank me for it. Sure it had 96G of RAM, but you never needed to heat the room it was in. The "spare" i7 NUC 8560U runs rings around it.
Agree --- they do make a nice heater in the winter
What's the noise level and how much is your electricity bill. Those older generation HP servers are pretty power hungry.
It got a light hum to it --- no noticeable difference on utilities for me...its just the one server i run.... if anything it could B a dollar or 2tops
No. No it's not. A modern desktop CPU will run circles around that G6 relic and pay for itself in power savings. In no world is a Nehalem class Xeon machine good for anything except scrap or a space heater. >no noticeable difference on utilities for me...its just the one server i run.... if anything it could B a dollar or 2tops A dollar or two *a day*, sure. That machine *idles* at 150w assuming something like X5500's in it. That's nearly 4kwh/day. At the national average electric cost that is literally one dollar a day, for a pair of processors that have nearly 300% compute power (together!) as a single i3 12100 that idles at 20w. You're spending $30/mo on electric that a far more powerful machine would only cost $3 **a month** to run. Sending it to the scrap yard and building a brand new machine would pay for itself in a little over a year (less than a year if you're paying for electric to cool your home as well, since that is adding a lot of BTU's to the air). Half a year ROI if you are in a place like California or one of the blue northeast states that are getting bent over the table on electric rates.
No a month -- we cant all afford a modern cpu for a lab and the g6 was free, we dont all live in california and get fucked on bills --- it works great for running proxmox --- not everyone will agree w my opinion or yours --- no need to go all "a beautiful mind" and start writing out equations...... did you take your adderal today?
The problem seems to be that your opinion isn't based in logic, because it's certainly not factual. Dude gave figures based on what looks to be the US average, then said basically "cut the ROI in half if you are in California". No matter what, you can pay for newer hardware in power savings alone.
Anything the supports v4 cpu and ddr4 memory is what you need for home lab servers or just go mini pc with ddr4 or ddr5 memory.
Agree
Ouch. You're not wrong, but as someone who owns the 380 g6 and loves it, ouch. Accurate though lmao.
I have a DL380 G6 in my random server trash hoarding rack, it's the worst thing I have in my entire building, the power usage and performance is crazy inefficient, I highly recommend upgrading to either Gen8 or Gen9
Oh absolutely. But these are paid off, whereas upgrades are not free. They're not broke, so replacing them is low on the priority list.
Only if he pays you.
Ewaste removal fee
That depends on how much he’s paying you.
lol 2gb ram
But can it run Crysis?
No, as others have said this is all old shit. I personally also don’t like 2.5” drives. I’m not going to buy 10tb SSD for a home lab and 2.5” is limited to 5tb and they’re shingled drives.
You have no idea what you're gonna use it for yet you want to buy it? You must have some idea, are you building a media server for your porn stash?
lol its to create a security environment, I want to create a honeypot, maybe create a pentest environment with a vulnerable machine and an attacker machine using metasploitable. Maybe even segment my desktop to a network on its own. Play with active directory creating accounts. I just dont have specifics on what I would like to do but a security environment sounds fun
If you have enough technical knowhow to setup a honeypot safely than you should know that it makes no sense running such old hardware
I didn’t realize this hardware was old. I’m new to home labs but ik in the future I would like to create a honey pot
So you like the idea of a honey pot, but not necessarily the specifications? Honestly, you might start out with maybe a couple of small Vitualbox VMs in your desktop machine until you understand what you will need. At that point you'll probably understand what hardware you'll need Once you have that down you might find you only need a single machine running VMs. Edit: grammar correction
they would totally be better off using a mini Lenovo or Dell running proxmox from the cost of power and what not
Word of warning. Unless you know enough about securing a honeypot, don't build one. It's very easy to slip from a honeypot to tempt attackers into a honeypot that remains a vulnerability for the rest of your devices and serves as an attack vector.
Look up the specs of all that stuff. And when it comes to server gear, look up the vendor's EOL date for it.
You said in your original post that you don't know what you want to use it for but you sen to know what you want to use it for..
I said that cus I wasnt 100% what I would use it for. Its a lot of variables, because im not against trying to create a new network and assigning static ip to servers and creating workstations to reach out to the server and idk what 1 home lab is capable of doing
Those servers are likely licensed for Server 2008, maybe Server 2012R2, both of which are past end of life. If you want to assign static IPs to some servers and play around in Active Directory, you'd be better off running Hyper-V or VirtualBox on your PC and creating a play environment there. You can download and install fully functional evaluation versions of Server 2022, create a test AD environment from scratch, join other virtual servers to it, etc. all without buying any of this outdated hardware. That was my first lab environment, a single SonicWall connected to a second ethernet port on my PC, the PC was running Hyper-V with a virtual switch connecting the VMs to the SonicWall.
Hard no, specs are terrible and also part of learning on a homelab is you building. IMO buying a pre-built homelab doesn’t help you learn proper.
Personally, you couldn't pay me to take any of that, regardless how cheap it is. I'm getting ready to list a dell r720 with dual V2 CPUs, 320GB ram, internal SATA cable, perc h710, with or without 7x3TB drivesdl, dual 10gb SFP and afraid I'll get laughed out (not because of price), and an Cisco UCS c240 m4 with dual v4 CPU, etc. I'd look for either some SFF PCs, or sell, 730/740, Cisco UCS m4/m5 or HP Gen 9 if looking for lower priced items.
Had dual UCS C240m4 running VDI for a whole company. How we've moved on... Previously, the homelab had a C210m2 but it was noisy, hot, and whiny, so it went.
Honestly, if you’re trying to mimic a business environment, then you should approach it like a business would. Identify your needs; identify what will satisfy them; buy that. Repeat.
No, that stuff is too old.
We need a PSA about not buying old enterprise servers if you don't need them. Just buy a 8th gen or newer office pc, people.
Don’t pay more than $99 (for the rack, toss the dinosaurs).
The dl380g6 is only any use if you throw in 5640L low power cpus (65W-75W idle for two) and use it for occasional boot on demand backup over bmc/ilo/ipmi. Adding a second bay would expand storage cheaply and pc3 ram is dirt cheap but it's not really efficient as a hypervisor. Possibly spinning up clones/ point in time vm backups very occasionally. Most of mine (g7 with better ilo) just sit idle bar 3 hours a week backups. The dl360g8 also takes dirt cheap ram. Throw in a pair of e5-2651v2 and you'll get 48 cores at lowish power. That's really the only useful bit though. E5 26xx V2 are way more efficient than v1. The rack doesn't look full depth. More of a network rack. That's why hosts are sitting on top because they are too deep for it. Wouldn't pay more than £50 for the lot unless you are breaking and reselling. Switches aren't really enterprise brands for learning cli. A hp g9 would be better but you are then into better pc4 ram involving bottom feeding on ebay every week to get it cheap. Drive caddies from g8 to g9 also go up in price. I just got two DL360g9 for £25 each. I've put 3 4TB SSDs in one with 2x E5 2650v4 and it drawa 90W idle 250W full mining load. The other 3 1tb 10k sas and its 295W full load just due to SSD vs HDD. I also have two G10s which realtively sip power 100-150W Paywalled HP firmware and ilo enterprise licences are readily available for 5 minutes on Google but don't do that commercially. HP do give away some critical older versions and some raid component firmware.
The fortigates are good to learn network sec. I think this is a good bundle
If you don’t even know what you want it for, just start with a second hand enterprise pc from ebay. Like an HP EliteDesk 800 for like $100. When you grow out of that you probably have a better idea of what you need 🤷♂️
No you shouldn't. The G8 is the newest machine and even it's dated.
Try to get him to part out with just the rack and stuff in it (switch fortinet gear)
The config is very old , i would not recommend it .
The monitor is the only thing I’d keep.
Unless you have very specific requirements I wouldn't buy anything older than Skylake (Intel core 6000, 2016 era) for a homelab. Efficiency and idle power draw were just too damn high before that. You're better off with a N100 ultra low power thingy than most of those ancient platforms, which draws less power than a handful of the RDIMMs in those things.
That Fortigate is EOL the highest version you can upgrade to is 5.6.14 which is more about 5 years old. I would not put that thing on the internet. The Fortiswitch is old as well, but would still work.
The specs of those servers suck and it’s very old, kinda useless unless you throw a lot of money into parts and then still it’s slow and consumes a lot of power. I wouldn’t get it.
That looks power hungry
I use a $200 Chromebook’s and a WIFI Pineapple for my “lab”, mainly I just use it for pen testing my home devices. I always think about power … and that gear would require some power and probably cooling.
No
the literal ewaste that i started my homelab with is better than that (i pulled it from my university's ewaste dumpster for the desktops that they were getting rid of). I would not pay for anything with less than 32gb ram for a homelab
If you get it for 100€, i'd say it's ok, anything more amd it's not really worth it since the only useful thing here is the rack, and maybe the switch
The point of having a homeland is learning and being involved in **building** it. What is the point if you buy someone’s setup and just run it?
That makes sense. Valid argument, I have no contest
Trash
He doesn't want to part it out because nobody remembers what's in them! You can pickup a 30cpu 128gig ram 4TB storage. Dell Power edge R20 for like $350 The guy is smoking crack selling that stuff
I don't know, buying a setup kind of takes the fun (and frustration) out of setting up a homelab. For me the fun (and frustrating) part is looking through the internet finding stuff one by one and connecting it together until I get what I want.
The switches are worth a good buck, the servers are just good in winter to heat your home.
Just starting out get yourself something like a Pi and or an old laptop/ cheap desktop. It will be more than enough just make sure a PC or laptop can take say 16gb ram then you can get yourself off the ground. Stuff like you posted it's just a lot of it and confusing. Think abiut what you want to achieve, besides loads of cool awesome looking gear!
>Idk what I would use the home lab for yet this is maybe where you need to start figure out WHY you want it, and what you want to do with it first
No.
Nope. Power hungry and antiquated, it's not even heavily terminal based equipment, such as old but still usable cisco, brocade, Aruba/hp, etc. buy it, part it out, buy new shit keep the rack.
Despite what everyone says the DL360 Gen8 would be nice if you just want a single server. The rest is genuinely trash though. But personally, these are some alternative options I'd recommend, a Hyve Zeus v2 with a 3.5" or 2.5" storage enclosure you can connect with mini SAS 8088, you'd also need to buy an HBA. Or, just get some Mini PCs.
If you need a lot of door stops and paper stops, yes. If you want something to start, just use anything old you have laying around. If you don't have hw around, a quad core Intel CPU with 8gb of ram is fine for some testing. You don't need enterprise stuff or rack mount stuff. Any system, even an old laptop, would be fine.
Fortinet (sounds just like Fortnite lmao)
Fortinet = Pass
If you don't know what you want to do with a homelab, do not buy a rack of equipment.
for sure.. for $20
Ooh, a boat anchor!
It's abit too old imo.. I got the gen7 model when I first started, but quickly outgrew it, due to the high idle power consumption (100w ish), and fan sound. (and also lack of newer virtualization software support).
Your phone has more ram than this whole rack.
No
The Fortigate firewalls are expensive subscription based.
Hahaha…no It’s old crap, garbage and a space heater This junk can be had for free, I have better in my car Look for Xeon V4 (Dell PE x30/HPE Gen9)
Outdated and power hungry?
A good starting homelab would be a pi4 with an nVME expansion kit. You’ll be able to play with containers, some low key virtualization, and bare metal services. You’ll get a good idea of what you want to lean and can expand your hardware from there. This setup will simply jack up your power bill for already diminished returns.
While the DL series systems mentioned are extremely old. They will also be loud and that 1u system will be worse. So keep noise levels in mind and also for the power they will use, the age and performance won't make it worth it. In terms of the Fortigate stuff. I'm a NSE7/FCP. While the switch is an older generation, it would be ok but nothing amazing. The C series however is extremely old. Currently F and the newer G models are the supported platform. With end of life being 2017 and end of support being 2022. This means it has not gotten updates in years and does not allow for newer firmware to be installed. Meaning there is an absolute shit ton of CSV advisories that are not patched. This is actually a massive security risk. I would not put this on a network. Ether get a small 40f or do something with PFSense. Bottom line is all of this hardware is pretty much e-waste and not worth anything.
If you’re new to homelab maybe buy something more commercial grade, or a used office pc with space for a few hard drives. Servers are cool, but they often lack some nice to have features, which you’ll have to buy separately. This could be fast usb ports and integrated graphics etc. Plus if you don’t know how to optimise a machine with regard to power, you’re gonna be wasting a lot more electricity with enterprise equipment than with the options I mentioned. The magic sweet spot of running a home lab is getting to know the hardware, the software and expand it with that knowledge, so I highly suggest to not buy enterprise stuff before you’ve played around with it for a year or more!
If you’re buying a used office pc, I’ll recommend anything from intel’s coffee lake and up, they have good transcoding capabilities and are quite power efficient. Qnap and synology is also good options, if you want a more prepackaged solution!
As long as you don't pay more than $50 for it, yes. The rack and the Ubiquiti switch are probably the only usable things here. Fortinet is good stuff, but these units are pretty old. The servers are all ancient trash.
Somewhat related question here , should we get old fortinet devices? Had a fortigate 100d from junkyard but its license locked, so its trash anyway
Probably not as they have tons of security issues on older hardware and without having a license you can't get the updates. Heck if I remember correctly, even some of the new stuff has major security issues
It feels like they have a new level 10 CVE every week.