this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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Will this be overkill or otherwise not recommended for someone who is new and just starting to learn?

My goal is to have something I can grow into, but initially I'd like to host a few VMs, game servers, and a have place to store content. I'd also like to host a PLEX server in the future as well but might buy a separate piece of hardware for it specifically down the road. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help a newbie!

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Dont worry my starter build has 32 cores 64 threads 128gb of ram and 7.2 tb of nvme ssds

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Never use dell it's absolute trash,

Go for supermicro

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Is that sale still going on or was it one day?

Pricing out a 730xd on their site now starts at $680.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Rack servers like the dell r720 are nice platforms for passively cooled Nvidia tesla gps’s if you’re into ai/ml…

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

There is no such thing as overkill. You need for reasons!!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago
  • 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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] atkion 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Elaborate on this? I was under the impression that enterprise often had way less anti-user shit you see with consumer hardware, as well as being much more reliable long-term.

What are the pros of consumer hardware, other than the obvious formfactor/heat/noise/power? (Genuinely asking, I'm very new to this space)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

No server is overkill If you want it can afford or and can deal with the Energy consumption

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Good starter build :)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Nothing is overkill. I’d say go for it!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Probably overkill, but look at that price!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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!!!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I would love this rig except that DELL runs PERC on all of them, hardware raid is not your friend with Proxmox

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Just swap to a dell HBA, they are dirt cheap

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (5 children)

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
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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (4 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Even my v2 are fine for most things, but the single thread performance leaves something to be desired particularly for game servers...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Pretty much only reason why I'm using my v4. I was lucky enough to receive a free R730xd with dual E5-2695 v4, 512GB memory, and 36TB storage but looking to upgrade the drives.

I'll probably retire that whenever I decide to upgrade the hard drives again.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

If you can afford it and you have space it's not overkill.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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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[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

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.

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