Need help to chose a server for virtualization

[Yarus98]

Hello guys !

 

Recently i was looking to buy one server to host multiple VM, w10, wServer, pfsense and many more to train on them and maybe host some game server to play with friends.

I am a beginner so i don't know what hardware to chose and at what price.

 

I found the bargainhardware website and made 2 config for approximatly a 270€ without vat. (My budget is 300€)

 

 

I asked in a reddit discord about this config and got the response that i should not buy on BH and that this config is e-waste.

 

Sorry if i do some stupid thing im new in server hardware and don't know much about it i hope you guys will be nice with me. :)

 

[NelizMastr]

The DL380 Gen8 is a wonderful server for the money, now that they're being dumped left and right. 

 

Things to note:

 

- You shouldn't need the FLOM card, the server has 4 ports on board already.

- Each harddrive needs a caddy

- Don't buy a single 146GB drive, get a cheap new SSD instead and run the rest on the SAS 10k disks

 

I'd go with the second configuration myself. The V2 Xeons are a better value buy than the power hungry 1st gen parts. 

 

We still have a bunch of these in service running VMware ESXi 6.7 so if you're looking at that, you're good to go.

With a small workaround it will run 7.0 as well.

 

[wseaton]

Per core the CPU's here are about on par with a i7-2600, except you have 10 of them. Er, 20 if you go with the second box and extra CPU which you will likely never use.

 

Perfectly adequate for medium tasks and screwing around with. 

 

Drives are junk. 

[Needfuldoer]

I'm building my homelab around Dell R720s and R620s, which are basically the same thing as the HP DL360p and DL380p Gen8. They're a great value for money and they're ridiculously cheap for what you get out of them. 

 

If you're just puttering around with VMs by yourself, core count is more important than a high clock speed. I'd go for the dual E5-2660 v2s. (Twenty hyperthreaded Ivy Bridge cores will give you a lot of room to play. I used dual E5-2680 v2s in my compute machines.)

 

I'd get 16 gig DIMMs, that will leave you more room for expansion (and ZFS loves RAM). 64 gigs is a lot of room to start with, but you'll probably run into a RAM limit before anything else.

 

Agreed on the drives, get an SSD for the hypervisor boot drive. See if you can get six of those 600 gig 10k SAS drives. You can configure them as a RAIDz1 or RAIDz2 vdev, then later on double the capacity of your pool by adding another set of six drives as a second vdev. That will leave four free bays for a boot mirror, hot spares, or what have you.

 

One nice-to-have is IPMI with a virtual console. I'm not sure what HP calls theirs, but Dell calls theirs iDRAC Enterprise. The last few board updates for the 12th gen servers with iDRAC 7 added an HTML5 web KVM with virtual media (earlier versions used a Java client. Blech.)

 

If noise is a concern, the HP Z820 is the workstation tower equivalent to the Gen8 servers.

[Yarus98]

On 3/12/2022 at 8:13 PM, NelizMastr said:

The DL380 Gen8 is a wonderful server for the money, now that they're being dumped left and right. 

 

Things to note:

 

- You shouldn't need the FLOM card, the server has 4 ports on board already.

- Each harddrive needs a caddy

- Don't buy a single 146GB drive, get a cheap new SSD instead and run the rest on the SAS 10k disks

 

I'd go with the second configuration myself. The V2 Xeons are a better value buy than the power hungry 1st gen parts. 

 

We still have a bunch of these in service running VMware ESXi 6.7 so if you're looking at that, you're good to go.

With a small workaround it will run 7.0 as well.

 

Sorry for late reply i was busy. 

For the FLOM i looked at the BH pictures and there was no ethernet port on the back, if server end up coming with 8 ethernet port im fine with it because i want most of the VM to have a dedicated port.

and for the 146gb drive you are correct, i have a spare 120gb ssd in my pc but do i need an adaptor for ssd in the caddy ? if yes do you know where i can get it ?

On 3/12/2022 at 9:37 PM, wseaton said:

Drives are junk. 

Then what drive should i get ? i looked online and all i was able to find costed more than the one on BH.

Or do i go SATA and not SAS ? and new one cost way too much.

On 3/12/2022 at 11:34 PM, Needfuldoer said:

I'd get 16 gig DIMMs, that will leave you more room for expansion (and ZFS loves RAM). 64 gigs is a lot of room to start with, but you'll probably run into a RAM limit before anything else.

Mmmh yes but am i going to need more than 192gb of ram ? im mostly going to do virtualization i don't need much storage, so ZFS getting less ram isn't really a problem?

On 3/12/2022 at 11:34 PM, Needfuldoer said:

One nice-to-have is IPMI with a virtual console. I'm not sure what HP calls theirs, but Dell calls theirs iDRAC Enterprise. The last few board updates for the 12th gen servers with iDRAC 7 added an HTML5 web KVM with virtual media (earlier versions used a Java client. Blech.)

HP got ILO.

 

Thank you guys for the replies.

[Yarus98]

Oh and on the bargain hardware website in the RAID tab when configuring the server there is only "No raid" option

 

 

But on the specification tab of the server it say "Onboard HP Smart Array P420i"

Does it mean it will come with the P420i controller and that drive will be detected and usable?

Because it would be unfortunate to receive the server and not being able to use any drive with it.

[NelizMastr]

15 minutes ago, Yarus98 said:

Oh and on the bargain hardware website in the RAID tab when configuring the server there is only "No raid" option

 

But on the specification tab of the server it say "Onboard HP Smart Array P420i"

Does it mean it will come with the P420i controller and that drive will be detected and usable?

Because it would be unfortunate to receive the server and not being able to use any drive with it.

The P420i is on the system board, so yes, this is likely included.