[talk] When is hardware too old?

[Sujit K M]

On Thu, Oct 10, 2019, 6:31 AM Charles Sprickman <spork at bway.net> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Some home lab advice…? So I’ve been gifted an old Dell R-720. It’s from
> 2012 or so, pretty old.
>
> It has:
>
> 2 CPUs - Intel Xeon CPU E5-2609 0 @ 2.40GHz, 4 cores (8 w/hyperthreading)
> 48 GB RAM - DDR3 DIMM 1066MHz (6 x 8GB)
> PERC 710 mini RAID controller w/512MB RAM and battery backup
> 4 Broadcom 1Gb/s NICs
> 600 GB Seagate 15K 3.5” drive x 5 (2 are showing errors, may or may not be
> bad)
> iDRAC 7 (no enterprise license)
>
> It all seems to be in working order, other than two possibly bad drives.
>
> So… I have three options:
>
> - recycle
> - give away
> - use for some VMs
> - sell (maybe $300 if I’m lucky and go local w/craigslist?)
>
> Now every now and then I find a need to spin up some weird linux distro or
> some other testing that I don’t really want to run in vmware on my desktop
> or laptop because it’s going to be around for a few weeks/months. My home
> “server” is an older HP and I try not to use it for experiments, plus it
> only has 16GB of RAM.
>
> I can tell this was originally used for a bunch of virtual machines, and
> if it can handle 6 instances of Windows Server 2012, then a few *BSD and
> Linux installs are going to do OK. The “iDRAC” is on a trial enterprise
> license and it’s pretty nice - remote BIOS updates, java-less & flash-less
> remote KVM, there’s an SD slot to boot off of, it’s all pretty nice, even
> “luxurious” for home use. I’d run the freebie vmware hypervisor just so I
> could move VMs between this box and my desktop w/o much fuss.
>
> What I’d spend money on:
>
> - bootleg iDRAC enterprise key ($30 on ebay)
> - 2 or more large/cheap SSDs for VMs (I’d keep two of the existing drives
> for the OS - about $130 x2)
>
> This is all much cheaper than introducing a new server.
>

Was in a similar position. Would keep a gifted free hardware to hack and do
personal work when needed.

Thoughts?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Charles
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