Will this be overkill or otherwise not recommended for someone who is new and just starting to learn?
My goal is to have something I can grow into, but initially I'd like to host a few VMs, game servers, and a have place to store content. I'd also like to host a PLEX server in the future as well but might buy a separate piece of hardware for it specifically down the road. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help a newbie!
That’s going to be noisy as hell.
If you want dell go with T420. It’s quiet as hell and only uses about 100W or less
With great power comes great electricity bill...
My whole rack (6 servers and a bunch of Cisco switching equipment.)
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.
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.
Might be overkill, but who cares! That price's a steal!
Uses way too much electricity.
It’s cheap because you will pay with the power bill.
Gonna be noisy
That was my initial thought as well.
When I had an a R720, the power consumption was only 70w. How? Simple:
Pare the machine to what you actually need. If you don't need 40 cores, have the system run with a single CPU installed.
Look at the how much memory is really been used. To run Linux and various Linux VMs and even a Windows one, 32GB or 48GB can go a long ways. If you load it with 384GB, great, but there will be a power penalty.
BIOS Performance settings make a huge difference. Setting the machine to max performance will disable C states and makes for a slightly faster but very loud and power hungry server.
Take advantage of power savings. Have the RAID controller spin down HDDs that are not being access. Energize only a single PS to cut another 10-12W off the usage.
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.
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
$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.
If you buy purpose built enterprise gear be mindful of the space, power and noise they produce.
Personal experience here - had both and the fan noise on these is nuts
I can tell you from direct experience if owning an R720XD, this bitch is loud, and hot. During the summer, AC stays on 90% of the time near max cooling, during the winter, I have no use for a heater because I already have one lmao. Power consumption is about the 250-400w constantly with HDDs with SSDs it would probably be a bit lower, but I'm sure I'm paying about 100 to 150 dollars more a year, but luckily I'm not worried about power consumption or price. If you don't care about heat, noise, and power consumption, so far, I really enjoy it! Check out my latest post where I detailed my whole current setup.
As others have said, there are way better options out there than the 720. In terms of literally everything lol. You could probably spend a couple extra 200 bucks and get something way newer, efficient, quieter, and more or equally as powerful. Let me know if you have any questions, I live with one in my bedroom lol
I'm happy to spend that much extra for better performance, especially if it helps avoid the long run annoyance of the heat and noise.
What would you recommend I keep my eye out for as an alternative?
Well first I think it'd be better to ask you first, what do you plan on using it for? Do you already know what you want to do with it? If not, I would do as others have suggested. Hold back on a rack mounted server for a while, grab a desktop, load it with ram HDDs (or SSDs) put proxmox on it, and tinker with it there. Once you've got that itch to buy more, then now at least you'll know what you need.
My use case is, running some core VMs and LXCs that will run 24/7 along with later down the line some VMs that I'll use for learning Active Directory and performing red and blue team activities on them.
I agree with people on here talking about buying a NUC type box and using that. It's likely to be as powerful or more powerful than the 720, low power usage, basically non existent noise, but you'll be missing out in storage and RAM. The cool part is, let's say you do get a NUC, play with it for a year and then you want to buy more, you can always repurpose the old NUC for some other use. There's also NUCs with dual gigabit/ 2.5 gigabit NICs in them, if you plan ahead for it's repurposing, you could convert it into a very nice router for your network. One WAN and one LAN for your home, then use a switch of some sort to give the rest of your devices connectivity.
But back to what I asked, what do you want to do with the hardware? If you don't have a clue, look at YouTube and search for other people's home lab setups, there's a variety, from purely entertainment like Plex and jellyfin to stream movies across their network, to a security lab for learning AD. Find what you want first, then build what you need for what you want.
I won't be doing anything too crazy with them, just hosting some Valheim, a PLEX server, and a couple VMs for now
If you can afford it and you have space it's not overkill.
Your local power company will definitely love you. Pro Tip: You can use it as a space heater and white noise machine.
Look at getting one with no drives and filling it up with SSDs. Uses less electricity.
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.
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!!!
If you're anywhere near louisiana I'll sell you a r720xd with a rack and 128gb ram for $400
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.
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
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
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've got a R620 and it's an outstanding box for labbing. I only keep it on when I need to use it, and it's in my basement for the noise issue. I max out at 300 watts with everything started, 170 idle.
I turn it on with the idrac when needed or with Home Assistant.
There is no such thing as overkill!
I have this exact unit in my garage just with less ram. It is the center of my home lab it runs half a dozen vms and several other things and even has gpu support. It is an expensive work horse power dies have a price though. I have invested in a rack, switches, 10gb network and more. I you do get it start small and explore its true VM power. And find a home for it that is outside your living area.
You can get an R730 for an extra hundred.
Won’t have drives but I see one with 24cores and 128gb ddr4 on amazon.
I have one. It’s loud. It’s power hungry.
Figured out what you’re trying to run. I turned mine off and am keeping it to the side for now. I have a 10500 with 64gb for esxi running most of my apps and it saves on power big time. For storage I just use a synology but have a power edge t330 I’ve been playing with. Even the t330 is power hungry according to kilawatt.
You can quiet the fans using IPMI.. and mine pulls about 150w loaded with 10T drives and a GPU for Plex transcoding
In all honesty, you should look for something in the R730 series, get a small formfactor machine so you can fit sata/Sas SSDs. It also has better processor support (v4 series Xeons) and DDR 4 support. I think that the x30 series are the first dell servers to support PCIE bifurcation which makes it super easy to add NVME drives via a PCIe card.
It's perfect! Have fun.
Im gonna get hate for this but ... I made the choice three times now to go consumer garde for my homelab (except for SSDs and HDDs naturally).
A used 5900 will use next to no electricity when idling, it's so much easier to keep whisper quiet & in most cases much faster than those two Xeons. Plus I can easily fit my HDDs on rubber adapters (with fans) in 5.25" bays (I hate HDD cages/bays/caddies).
... sure, I have a backup server rather than built-in redundancy & no ECC, but what is one restart per year anyway. Perhaps the biggest difference is memory lanes, but I would never saturate them in my use cases.
Also easier to RGB all the things this way (I'm joking).