Homelab

That’s going to be noisy as hell.

If you buy purpose built enterprise gear be mindful of the space, power and noise they produce.

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.

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.

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

It’s cheap because you will pay with the power bill.

With great power comes great electricity 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.

$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.

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.

If you want dell go with T420. It’s quiet as hell and only uses about 100W or less

Personal experience here - had both and the fan noise on these is nuts

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.

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.

There is no such thing as overkill!

If you're anywhere near louisiana I'll sell you a r720xd with a rack and 128gb ram for $400

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.

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.

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

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).

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)

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.

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.

Your local power company will definitely love you. Pro Tip: You can use it as a space heater and white noise machine.

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.

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.