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<div style="direction: ltr;">Seems like you got good machine! Is it noisy?</div>
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<div id="divRplyFwdMsg" dir="dir="ltr""><font face="Calibri, sans-serif"><b>From:</b> talk <talk-bounces@lists.nycbug.org> on behalf of Charles Sprickman <spork@bway.net><br>
<b>Sent:</b> Wednesday, October 9, 2019 21:01<br>
<b>To:</b> talk<br>
<b>Subject:</b> [talk] When is hardware too old?
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Hi all,<br>
<br>
Some home lab advice…? So I’ve been gifted an old Dell R-720. It’s from 2012 or so, pretty old.<br>
<br>
It has:<br>
<br>
2 CPUs - Intel Xeon CPU E5-2609 0 @ 2.40GHz, 4 cores (8 w/hyperthreading)<br>
48 GB RAM - DDR3 DIMM 1066MHz (6 x 8GB)<br>
PERC 710 mini RAID controller w/512MB RAM and battery backup<br>
4 Broadcom 1Gb/s NICs<br>
600 GB Seagate 15K 3.5” drive x 5 (2 are showing errors, may or may not be bad)<br>
iDRAC 7 (no enterprise license)<br>
<br>
It all seems to be in working order, other than two possibly bad drives.<br>
<br>
So… I have three options:<br>
<br>
- recycle<br>
- give away<br>
- use for some VMs<br>
- sell (maybe $300 if I’m lucky and go local w/craigslist?)<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
What I’d spend money on:<br>
<br>
- bootleg iDRAC enterprise key ($30 on ebay)<br>
- 2 or more large/cheap SSDs for VMs (I’d keep two of the existing drives for the OS - about $130 x2)<br>
<br>
This is all much cheaper than introducing a new server.<br>
<br>
Thoughts?<br>
<br>
Thanks,<br>
<br>
Charles<br>
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