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!
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.
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.
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.
Might be overkill, but who cares! That price's a steal!
Uses way too much electricity.
Gonna be noisy
That was my initial thought as well.
Good starter build :)
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.
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.
Is that sale still going on or was it one day?
Pricing out a 730xd on their site now starts at $680.
Rack servers like the dell r720 are nice platforms for passively cooled Nvidia tesla gps’s if you’re into ai/ml…
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.
There is no such thing as overkill. You need for reasons!!
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
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.
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)
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.
That’s going to be noisy as hell.
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.
Never use dell it's absolute trash,
Go for supermicro
No server is overkill If you want it can afford or and can deal with the Energy consumption
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!!!
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.
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.
Nothing is overkill. I’d say go for it!
Probably overkill, but look at that price!
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
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).
Personal experience here - had both and the fan noise on these is nuts
You can write a script to control the fans.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Even my v2 are fine for most things, but the single thread performance leaves something to be desired particularly for game servers...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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: