Homelab

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.

I have been thinking about this myself.

The question I have is there any reason to get a rack server?

Also, would it make sense to get multiple and put them in a cluster?

Are any rackmount servers low power? or is this just an unrealistic expectation.

Honestly I’ve been finding used workstations to be amazing starters and even for light to moderate compute nodes,

My goto currently is the Lenovo p520 they run usually around $200 kitted out and come with usually a skylake xeon workstation cpu and are nearly dead silent.

• 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

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

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

Never use dell it's absolute trash,

Go for supermicro

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.

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

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 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

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.

Good starter build :)

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

I have 3 servers. 2 R620 and 1 R630. The fans are loud before post but after they are quite quiet. I have them in my garage so noise/heat is not an issue for me nor it the power consumption. If I were in EU that would be a different conversation. I run Proxmox on them in a cluster and nested 7 ESXi “servers” along with a bunch of other LXCs and VMs. I don’t think it’s a huge investment for less than $400. You could flash that H710p to IT mode and have the TruNas ( or any other one ) manage your HDDs.
Also at the same time reduce the fan speed. You can have so much fun and functionality with it. Keep in mind the everything resides on 1 physical server and you will not have any redundancy. However, Proxmox, ESXi and the like need at least 2(+ witnesses) or 3 to allow you High Availability ( HA ) and to be able to move your VMs. Having 1 hypervisor on the bare bones and nesting ( installing other Hypervisors) under it you could create a hell of a lab.

Probably overkill, but look at that price!

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.

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.

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)

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.

Overpriced for R720. At that price you can get 730 or even 740 which will be more compute dense and have ddr4 memory.

I would go for an old pc or just an intel nuc with proxmox to start. Calculate the power costs for a server like this before you buy it. Also they can be REALLY loud

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

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.

Don't make the same mistake that so many of us did. Don't start with Enterprise hardware. It's not made for us, put this $400 into some half decent consumer hardware from eBay.

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