Dell PowerEdge 2900 Upgrades

[SovietBroski]

Before I get into the thick of it, here is a disclaimer:
I have no clue what I am doing in the realm of servers. I have a good bit of experience with consumer-class PC hardware, but that is it.

In any case, I ended up being given a decommissioned Dell PowerEdge 2900 that was otherwise going to be scrapped. They kept all of the original drives for security reasons but everything else on it is stock and functional as far as I can tell. I grabbed a spare drive I had lying around and booted it with Ubuntu Server just to play around, see what I could see, test system functionality, etc.

I knew going in that this was not bleeding-edge hardware and was not expecting a lot in terms of speed, but man oh man this thing is not fast.

So now I am thinking about hardware upgrades. Nothing bank busting, I just want to bring it closer to modern standards.

I am having a hard time finding information about component compatibility and form factors. There is no way it is all proprietary rite? 

If anyone could help me out with some tips on server hardware standards, form factors, compatibility, etc. I would really appreciate it! 

I look forward to the discussion; thank you all for your time!

[farmernr1]

Hi SovietBroski

 

as with all old tech the first issue usually is the hard drive itself.

Quote

I grabbed a spare drive I had lying around and booted it with Ubuntu Server just to play around, see what I could see, test system functionality, etc.
 

So my first question is: Which kind of hard drive did you have lying around? (SSD or HDD?)

 

In order to further assist you with your issues I'd need you to tell me the exact specs of your server.

Afterwards I'll gladly assist you in determining whether an upgrade makes sense or you should save your money for something else....

 

Quote

I am having a hard time finding information about component compatibility and form factors. There is no way it is all proprietary rite? 

For compatible hardware refer to: Server

 

Sidenote: Whilst taking a look in the "task manager" you might want to find out which component is running at 100% and creating a bottleneck..

 

Fun fact: I created my LTT account just right now to answer for this post, so hope I can help!

 

[AbsoluteFool]

18 hours ago, SovietBroski said:

Before I get into the thick of it, here is a disclaimer:
I have no clue what I am doing in the realm of servers. I have a good bit of experience with consumer-class PC hardware, but that is it.

In any case, I ended up being given a decommissioned Dell PowerEdge 2900 that was otherwise going to be scrapped. They kept all of the original drives for security reasons but everything else on it is stock and functional as far as I can tell. I grabbed a spare drive I had lying around and booted it with Ubuntu Server just to play around, see what I could see, test system functionality, etc.

I knew going in that this was not bleeding-edge hardware and was not expecting a lot in terms of speed, but man oh man this thing is not fast.

So now I am thinking about hardware upgrades. Nothing bank busting, I just want to bring it closer to modern standards.

I am having a hard time finding information about component compatibility and form factors. There is no way it is all proprietary rite? 

If anyone could help me out with some tips on server hardware standards, form factors, compatibility, etc. I would really appreciate it! 

I look forward to the discussion; thank you all for your time!

The DPE2900/9050 series have limited upgrade posibilities. In the terms of CPU you might get faster clock speed. But 4 cores is the maximum. Also there is no hyperthreading. So upgrades doesen't make any sense. When it comes to hard drives the max capacity is 2TB as the RAID controller can't handle any bigger. While these controllers are backwards compatible with SATA. 

 

Changing out parts is more or less impossible unless you are good at case mods, in which case you could atleast use the chassis to build another system from the ground up.

[zeibis]

It depends what you want to do with the server. If you can find drives it can be a freenas box, but those cores are slow and memory is very limited. There is no way you can bring it to modern standards. If its dual core you can upgrade to quad core and buy some fast drives for it. But its ancient.

[SovietBroski]

On 9/27/2019 at 2:14 PM, farmernr1 said:

as with all old tech the first issue usually is the hard drive itself.

So my first question is: Which kind of hard drive did you have lying around? (SSD or HDD?)

The drive I used is an HDD (an old 80 gig VelociRaptor).

On 9/27/2019 at 2:14 PM, farmernr1 said:

 

In order to further assist you with your issues I'd need you to tell me the exact specs of your server.

Afterwards I'll gladly assist you in determining whether an upgrade makes sense or you should save your money for something else....

I will update this post with a proper spec / parts list this evening.

On 9/27/2019 at 2:14 PM, farmernr1 said:

Fun fact: I created my LTT account just right now to answer for this post, so hope I can help!

Awesome, thank you, and welcome!

[SovietBroski]

On 9/28/2019 at 3:58 AM, zeibis said:

It depends what you want to do with the server.

I plan on doing as many different things as I can (one at a time of course) because what I am mostly interested in is learning. I figured the best place to start would be to configure it as a simple file server for my local network. I plan on doing more advanced projects with networking and security as time goes on, but a lot of that will have to depend on money and upgrade restrictions. 

[SovietBroski]

On 9/28/2019 at 3:35 AM, AbsoluteFool said:

Changing out parts is more or less impossible unless you are good at case mods, in which case you could atleast use the chassis to build another system from the ground up.

Are there any standard formfactors for things like motherboards and power supplies with this type of hardware or is it all unique to the manufacturer? I assume it isn't ATX or eATX and so on.

[Electronics Wizardy]

13 minutes ago, SovietBroski said:

Are there any standard formfactors for things like motherboards and power supplies with this type of hardware or is it all unique to the manufacturer? I assume it isn't ATX or eATX and so on.

This is propertiery server, so it doesn't user normal motherboards.

22 minutes ago, SovietBroski said:

I plan on doing as many different things as I can (one at a time of course) because what I am mostly interested in is learning. I figured the best place to start would be to configure it as a simple file server for my local network. I plan on doing more advanced projects with networking and security as time goes on, but a lot of that will have to depend on money and upgrade restrictions. 

Id put a hypervisor on the hardware, then you can learn about vms and easily change oses. Look at something like proxmox or esxi. I think this is too old to run hyper-v

 

Just saying, if you plan to leave this running for an extended period of time, these are very power hungry systems, so if yousing using it for an extended period of time, id probably get something a bit newer and more power efficient, and id would pay for its self in the power savings alone.

[farmernr1]

Agreeing with @Electronics Wizardy

I'd recommend you installing a HyperVisor like ESXi on there.

 

On what you've told us about your plans I'd recommend to go out and buy something a bit newer which then could be capable of running several VM's.

 

PS:

Since you are just interested in learning you might want to consider renting a root server at some hoster(depending on time/money you want to spend)

 

[Salacious B Crum]

put openmediavault on it and make it a server you can also play with docker but going any harder will be futile as stated it is pretty weak processing power to go crazy on