I’m not tech illiterate, but it’s also not my job or anything. That said I managed to figure out how to get a synology up and running and it hosts my Jellyfin and *arrs. Nothing too exciting. I also have a couple of vps’s that I use for nextcloud, a recipe server, all in docker containers. Not nothing but also, not the hardest thing to accomplish.
Well, my manager gifted me an old Dell PowerEdge R720 and 4 hard drives. Yeah, this is way more than I know what to do with, or even where to start. Do I need to plug both power cables in? I still need to figure out how to get a monitor hooked up to it with what looks to be a VGA cable. And even then this thing is a behemoth and what do I even do with it?? My manager was so excited to talk to me about it and I’m all 😵💫
Where do I start?
Well, the first step is realizing it’s okay not to use it. My homelab is a mix of salvaged mini PCs and prosumer networking gear. It has nothing to do with the 6/7 figure gear I use at work, and I prefer it that way. Its simpler and lower stakes, is quieter, and uses way less power.
That all said, it’s a great server. if you do want to use it, there are many ways to start. First, you don’t need to plug both power supplies in, but you can. The server can run entirely on one of them. It has two in case one fails it can keep running, not because it needs 2x the power. For the monitor, yes you will likely need VGA. Servers rarely have modern video ports, because vga just works, costs nothing to add to a server, and is almost never used. Most of your physical interaction with a server should be though “out of band,” which dell calls “idrac.” This is a seperate networking port labeled on the server that lets you connect to a local website, put in a password, and then fully control the server. That includes powering it on, reboots, loading disc image iso files, on and on. The idrac will stay powered even when the server is off.
You may or may not have qn idrac license for that server. If you dont and your boss can’t give you one, you can use something like jetkvm instead when it’s released.
As to what to do either it, i would recommend installing different hypervisors or kubernetes suites and playing around. Proxmox, xcp-ng, k3s, harvestor, on and on. Once you find one you like, figure out how to use automation software to setup VMs and containers, like cloudinit, terraform, ansible, or nixOS.
Good luck, and enjoy. Getting started from scratch can be a lot, but it can also be a lot of fun. Go into it expecting to fail, fail a lot and try to learn what you like. That’s the best thing a homelab can do for you.
quieter, and uses way less power.
VERY IMPORTANT PAY ATTENTION TO THIS SENTENCE OP
I can’t believe this is relevant…
Yeah, I’m glad I don’t work with enterprise gear anymore, I swear I have permanent hearing damage from the server room…
My current setup is an old PC, a Raspberry Pi, and a Mikrotik router. Oh, and a VPS because CGNAT. Everything is quiet, and soon I’ll replace the old PC with something more power efficient (currently sucks 50W or so idle for no good reason).
Member when a single lightbulb was fucking 70-100W? What a shit hole civilization.
oOooo… Quite interesting.
If you are intending to use it, I have some thoughts about the way that you should get it setup and running.
First thing I would look into is getting the iDrac reset and working. iDrac is intended to allow you to view the display of the server without connecting a monitor, simply use a web page. It also allows you to power on/off the server remotely even if it is frozen or off. It is a simple web interface that allows you to control it.
After that, I have some questions about your intention for this server. If you are intending to use this server as a hypervisor, I would like to take just a moment to shill for Apache Cloudstack. I recently setup a server running this and it is going absolutely wonderfully. The reason I chose to use it is it is more open to DevOps workloads, by default compatible with Terraform and takes literally 5 minutes to setup an entire Kubernetes cluster. However, the networking behind it is a bit more advanced and if you want more detail just ask me. For now, suffice it to say that it is capable of running 201 vlans protected by virtual routers.
If that is too much to bite off for a hypervisor at one time, then Proxmox is the way to go. You can probably see a few videos from Linus Tech Tips involving that software. It has much simpler networking and can get you up and running in no time.
Finally, if you are intending to learn something a little more professionally viable, then I would talk to your boss about utilizing an unused VMWare license or perhaps working with Hyper-V(my least favorite option).
If you do intend a Hypervisor, then I would highly recommend setting up a raid. Now, the type of RAID depends highly on what you want. RAID 5 will probably work for a homelab, but I would still recommend a RAID 10. RAID 5 gives you more storage space, but I like the performance benefits of a RAID 10. I think that it is very important when multiple virtual devices are sharing the same storage. You can read more about the various RAID levels here: https://www.prepressure.com/library/technology/raid
I’ve seen others mention the redundancy for the PSUs. One note about that, they are meant to be plugged into 2 different circuits! Otherwise, if they are on the same one and it fails, then redundancy is out the window.
Not a requirement, but if this is going to be a data hoarding type deal or you want it highly available for your purposes, then you should make sure you keep this in mind.
On that same token, read up on RAID Levels for hard drive redundancy.
If you don’t want it, I’ll take it off your hands. I have a rack designed for that kind of hardware and all of the infrastructure to fully support it.
Uff, I wouldn’t even know how to ship that without it costing an arm and a leg
Depending on where you’re located I would happily pay for shipping.
Huh, I’m also in the PNW. This could work out. I think it’s a bit too much for my needs, and I really don’t have the space for it. That said, I do want to learn how to use it, and get it up and running, etc. But after that I would definitely be looking to get something more practical. And quiet if it’s as loud as people are saying.
That would be awesome. I have a Dell Optiplex 7040 Micro that might be better suited for your needs after you play around with the big server. Maybe we could trade?
While I would be open to a trade, I’d be more looking for something like the Synology that I already have, just not so walled garden. I currently have a number of 2.5 and 3.5 inch disks that I’d like to keep using, and I think the Optiplex is more of just a regular desktop than a server?
I don’t, but I’d still take it.
The multiple power supplies are for redundancy. It will work with one plugged in but you are “supposed” to plug in both.
It’s fundamentally not that different from a consumer desktop. Plug in a monitor and a keyboard and a USB with your preferred flavor of headless Linux installer on it. Configure ssh as the first thing you do because you won’t want to plug the monitor and keyboard into it every time you need to tweak something.
You can probably find VGA to HDMI adapters if you can’t find a monitor with VGA support.
I’d say if it’s as power hungry as people say, it’d maybe make a good on-demand backup solution. Install some NAS distribution and power it on once a month, make backups of your *arred collection and your laptop/workstation and shut it off again.
I’d start with proxmox.
I tried to start with OpenStack. Oof. Yup. Proxmox.
There are a lot of good guides. I run almost everything on proxmox these days, even virtualized my Windows, and (after a lot of messing around) got my GPU passed through for when I game.
I’m picturing open stack being fairly similar to Cloudstack? Cloudstack is nice, but does require some odd networking.
Like the other people said, use Proxmox. Just download the installer, flash it to a flash drive with Rufus and install it and then put it somewhere far away where the noise won’t bother you hopefully plug it into your network and then you can just run it.
One thing that I like to do is to install ubuntu server and then install Docker and Portainer on the server and then you can just run a whole bunch of Docker containers and have a lot of fun playing around with that.
There are a lot of guides for how to do that, but if you set up Proxmox first and then create a VM with, say, four CPUs and four gigs of RAM and 40 gigs of storage space, you’ll have more than enough room in that one virtual machine to run dozens of net services.
Some good ones to install are pihole or ad guard home and nginx reverse proxy.
You can go to DuckDNS and create a subdomain and then set the IP address to your internal ip.
Once you have that up, you can then go to Let’s encrypt and create a wildcard certificate and then give all of the services you’re running on Docker and on your NAS server an internal name with an SSL certificate instead of having to type in the IP addresses.
The sky is the limit and the more things that you play around with and try, the better you’ll get at them and the more things you’ll learn how to do.
This might be a stupid question, but here goes anyway. Why not install Ubuntu server without proxmox and run docker and Portainer the way you described it?
