HP DL380 G9 Upgrades

[PenguinMaster]

I bought an HP DL380 G9 early this year as my main home server and it has just been sitting around. The server will serve a variety of purposes for me. I'd like it to be a PLEX media server for all of my DVDs, so I can easily store them and retrieve them later. I'd want to save all of my game files on it as well (GTA V, Occasional Minecraft world saves...). Also, as a generic backup for miscellaneous computer files. I'm not sure whether this is possible with this server, but having no disks in my computer and having it boot from this server would be nice in the future. This last one isn't a big deal if it is not possible though. 

 

The Specs of the server are:

 

>2x Intel Xeon E5-2620 v3

>32GB DDR4 ECC (1Rx8 2400T, 8x 4GB sticks)

>B140i Controller - can be put in HBA mode

>12x 500GB WD Blue 7200rpm SATA Drives - these probably should be upgraded

>2x 800w 80+ Platinum Power Supplies

>10G SFP+ Card

 

The connection from the server to the main network switch will be SFP+ 10G and all the devices around the house will be 1GbE for now and maybe consider 10GbE in the future (Is 10GbE needed for network booting with no drives in the computer?)

 

I was thinking UNRAID for the main OS and I am if each of these use cases should be a different VM or how I should set it up. I am open to upgrading certain parts of the server (Processor, more RAM, better HDDs, SSD cache?...) Let me know your ideas! I appreciate them! I am a CS college student but I am just starting so this is new to me.

[RONOTHAN##]

UnRAID is a decent choice for this. I'm personally more of a TrueNAS guy, because ZFS is awesome and I'm cheap, but UnRAID has the superior virtualization platform that it sounds like you want. What you could always do is run something like ProxMox to host all your virtual machines, then virtualize TrueNAS, but that can be a headache to get working, and for ZFS to work correctly you'll want a lot of memory. 

 

The CPU should be fine for what you're doing. If you run into issues, then maybe consider an upgrade, but you probably won't need it. 

 

More RAM might be a good idea, depending on how many VMs you plan on running and whether or not you want to run ZFS. ZFS uses RAM as a cache before writing to the drives, and it absolutely loves it. My personal server (Dual E5 2630 V1s, 64GB RAM, 8x4TB drives) will use about 48-50GB of RAM when doing a backup. UnRAID doesn't work like that out of the box, so you won't need as much, just enough to run the OS and all your VMs. 

 

Better drives might be a good idea, WD Blues are the greatest NAS drives since they're SMR, but unless you need the extra speed they'd probably be fine. I'd mainly upgrade for capacity reasons if you're gonna upgrade, and if you do upgrade spend the extra on NAS drives then. 

 

An SSD cache won't really be necessary if all your computers are on gigabit. If you're upgrading everything to 10GbE or running a couple of VMs, then consider investing in an SSD cache. 

 

As for booting your computer off the NAS, I don't see how it wouldn't be possible, but I don't see it working out great either. Over the network will always give worse performance than if the drive was native in the system, given the higher latency and lower IOPS over ethernet. You could setup TFTP and try it however, I just wouldn't go and sell your boot drive if you do. 

[PenguinMaster]

@RONOTHAN##Thanks for your feedback! I greatly appreciate it.

 

What do you think about these parts for upgrades:

 

Proccesor: (Is the extra performance worth the extra power?) 

E5-2660v4		E5-2650Lv4
2.0 GHz		1.7 GHz
14		14
35MB		35MB
105 W		65 W
9.6 GT/s		9.6 GT/s
2400		2400
$120ea		$115ea

 

Memory: 

 

8 more of the 4GB DDR4 2400 R-DIMMs (the same ones) ~ for a total of 64GB (is this enough?)

 

Storage:

 

6x Seagate Iron Wolf Pro 4TB Drives & 2x WD Red 1TB SA500 Drives (Do I need more/less of any...?)

 

Graphics Card:

 

Some type of GTX 1650 but I'll probably wait until the prices on these are not so extreme (used for PLEX transcoding)

 

 

Let me know what you think. Thank you again!

[RONOTHAN##]

5 minutes ago, PenguinMaster said:

@RONOTHAN##Thanks for your feedback! I greatly appreciate it.

 

What do you think about these parts for upgrades:

 

Proccesor: (Is the extra performance worth the extra power?) 

E5-2660v4		E5-2650Lv4
2.0 GHz		1.7 GHz
14		14
35MB		35MB
105 W		65 W
9.6 GT/s		9.6 GT/s
2400		2400
$120ea		$115ea

 

Memory: 

 

8 more of the 4GB DDR4 2400 R-DIMMs (the same ones) ~ for a total of 64GB (is this enough?)

 

Storage:

 

6x Seagate Iron Wolf Pro 4TB Drives & 2x WD Red 1TB SA500 Drives (Do I need more/less of any...?)

 

Graphics Card:

 

Some type of GTX 1650 but I'll probably wait until the prices on these are not so extreme (used for PLEX transcoding)

 

 

Let me know what you think. Thank you again!

The CPUs I probably wouldn't bother upgrading, at least not yet. If you run a lot of VMs, it would be worth getting the 14 core chips, but given you're just starting out in the server world, the dual 6 cores you have should be enough

 

You probably won't need 64GB of RAM, especially if you run UnRAID, but even if you're running ZFS it should be enough.

 

Those storage drives look fine. You'll get 16TB of data assuming 2 drives of redundancy, and those SSDs if mirrored would do a good job of being a cache/VM host.

 

The GPU looks fine. 

[PenguinMaster]

15 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

The CPUs I probably wouldn't bother upgrading, at least not yet. If you run a lot of VMs, it would be worth getting the 14 core chips, but given you're just starting out in the server world, the dual 6 cores you have should be enough

 

You probably won't need 64GB of RAM, especially if you run UnRAID, but even if you're running ZFS it should be enough.

 

Those storage drives look fine. You'll get 16TB of data assuming 2 drives of redundancy, and those SSDs if mirrored would do a good job of being a cache/VM host.

 

The GPU looks fine. 

That sounds good. For the HDDs would Seagate Exos drives be better? They are rated for more reads and writes and are $40 cheaper than the Iron Wolf Pros for the same drive size. Do I need the data recovery service the iron wolf pros offer if I will have a backup anyway?

[RONOTHAN##]

1 minute ago, PenguinMaster said:

That sounds good. For the HDDs would Seagate Exos drives be better? They are rated for more reads and writes and are $40 cheaper than the Iron Wolf Pros for the same drive size. Do I need the data recovery service the iron wolf pros offer if I will have a backup anyway?

Exos drives are better drives than the Iron Wolf Pros. You probably won't need to have the data recovery if you're backing up (remember, RAID is not a backup), though I thought the Exos drives did come with data recovery (I could be wrong). 

 

That being said, you might want to wait on getting new drives, prices are awful for drives, though they are starting to come down. Probably in another few months prices will be down to earth. 

[PenguinMaster]

18 hours ago, RONOTHAN## said:

Exos drives are better drives than the Iron Wolf Pros. You probably won't need to have the data recovery if you're backing up (remember, RAID is not a backup), though I thought the Exos drives did come with data recovery (I could be wrong). 

 

That being said, you might want to wait on getting new drives, prices are awful for drives, though they are starting to come down. Probably in another few months prices will be down to earth. 

Some of the drives seem like they are pretty reasonable. I agree that the Exos Drives look like a better option than the Iron Wolfs. For a backup I have a 2012 Mac mini (i7, 16GB RAM, 240GB SSD) with a 16TB External HDD. I also have a 2014 Mac mini (i5, 4GB RAM, 240GB SSD) which I can switch the 2012 out for if you think the i5 would be a better option for this.

[RONOTHAN##]

24 minutes ago, PenguinMaster said:

I also have a 2014 Mac mini (i5, 4GB RAM, 240GB SSD) which I can switch the 2012 out for if you think the i5 would be a better option for this.

If it's just doing backups, a pentium 4 system would work just fine, since you really don't need a ton of speed with that drives. You might wanna just save the i7 system for when it will do something requiring a bit more power. Usually, you want your backup scheme to have redundancy as well, so having two of those 16TB drives in RAID 1 would be preferred. Granted, it's not as important as your main machine, but its still a good idea to have redundancy in your backup as well.

[PenguinMaster]

4 minutes ago, RONOTHAN## said:

If it's just doing backups, a pentium 4 system would work just fine, since you really don't need a ton of speed with that drives. You might wanna just save the i7 system for when it will do something requiring a bit more power. Usually, you want your backup scheme to have redundancy as well, so having two of those 16TB drives in RAID 1 would be preferred. Granted, it's not as important as your main machine, but its still a good idea to have redundancy in your backup as well.

Ok I will look into getting 2 drives in that case. Thanks for all your help!