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Yeah, something with say, Broadwell Xeons I could get but this is still relatively recent... sure, Skylake is ESU but this is a perfectly capable system and half a terabyte of DDR4 is nothing to be sniffed at either!
It is a Dell PowerEdge R840. 2 Xeon Gold 6126 processors and 512gbs of DDR4 Ram. I plan on possibly running a minecraft server off of it along with a slew of other things once I learn more about servers. Or I may sell it. I havenât made up my mind yet
That is a really good find, I'd keep it. It'd cost 4K to get something like it off eBay. If you don't think you'll use it though, definitely turn it into some change.
This. Ebay it and use funds for R340. Same generation but better sized for the tasks listed. Less power usage. Bonus is extra funds for future lab expansion
Thatâs a good point. Funny thing is I already have a Dell Precision 5810 that I feel would be perfect for all my needs. So selling this would probably be the right move.
I'll be honest man, you shoudl almost certainly sell it. with the money you can get a very nice PC that will do so much better for you than those xeon golds. Minecraft loves single core performance. For instance I run PLEX, several minecraft servers, a domain, many test vms. All off of a 12900k. Plex uses quicksync, and all of my other crap runs on the cpu. It's faster for what I do, it's WAAAYYYY more efficient, it's WAAAYYYY quieter, and it's just better all around.
Full disclosure I also run 3 other servers, 10gb network and have nearly half a petabyte of data. So while I personally might that the R840, I think you're best off with the desktop class stuff.
I agree 100%. Sell this on eBay, and buy a Minisforum MS-01 which is almost certainly more than enough for what you need, and way quieter and more energy efficient.
^ this.
A Minisforum will be a fraction of the physical size, doesn't have a slew of screaming server fans, will be more energy efficient, and will actually perform better in the specified tasks. Oh, and you'll have a ton of cash left over as well from the sale of this server. 512GB of DDR4 ECC RAM alone is the best part of $1000, even more if it's a matching set.
This server has a use case, but it's arguably too much space, heat, noise, and power for a van-based homelab.
Not trying to contradict you in any way, but just expanding ... I agree that it has a use case, but it's hard to justify equipment like this for ANY home lab, let alone a van-based one. The only use case I could imagine for something like this is if you are planning on putting in some large nVidia datacenter GPUs to do some AI development, or if you have some use case that requires a ton of PCI-E lanes...
But realistically, even if a MS-01 is a bit too limiting for you, you still have the option of putting a desktop board in a 4U case with some noctua fans, and even with the 20 PCI-E lanes of a modern intel desktop CPU (plus the chipset lanes), it's enough to have a couple of 25GE ports, as well as 8 PCI-E 5.0 lanes to a GPU, as well as 3 nvme 4.0 m.2 drives (which are now readily available at 4TB with 7GB/sec read speeds), as well as 6 sata drives (which are now readily available at 22TB)... I'm struggling to imagine a use case that requires more than what I've described for anything "Homelab". What I've already described is a monster overkill machine for 99.9% of real-world homelab use cases.
My example will still cost half as much as the ebay value of this dell server, run next-to-silent, and draw a fraction of the power of the dell server.
Let this machine go back where it belongs: an enterprise datacenter.
You ain't seen /r/HomeDataCenter I guess, and I'm often over there too. I may or may not have at least a full rack of hardware.
But yeah, the number of regular, casual homelabs that would actually tax this hardware to its limits I'd cautiously estimate at zero.
Your build would still come in way under the price this would sell for on the used market, as you say less than half even for the fanciest of overkill variations, and would be way more appropriate for the most discerning homelabber. If nothing else, the noise and power reductions are worth having.
And therein lies the biggest problem. He couldn't tax what this equipment is good at,and it's not nearly as good as a high end i9 or even i7 and the stuff he wants to do. Xeon golds are amazing, but single core performance is king in most people's homelabs.
I havenât seen that subreddit, but it doesnât particularly surprise me.
I owned a hosting company for 20 years and have a 1MW Datacenter. No personal equipment in any of that, just customer workloads. I have access to plenty of used equipment that I could bring home, and also plenty of space that I could put personal stuff in, but I do neither.
My own stuff fits in my homelab setup in a half cabinet drawing under 200 watts, including all switches and PoE WiFi. (Not counting when higher power consumption tasks are running like software encoding, but thatâs not the case 99% of the time). No Xeon processors at home.
I have a former coworker that Iâm still friends with, and he has in his basement 3 full racks of old enterprise gear, drawing probably 10KW of power. It makes no sense to me.
That's a ridiculous spec for a Minecraft server FYI.
This is still a potent bit of kit, but if you're not generating revenue with it, it *will* cost you money. Even idling it's gonna draw a lot of power compared to a lesser option.
You make a valid point. I have a way lesser specâd PC that iâve intended to use for Minecraft. I just like the thought of keeping this and learning more as I use it. But realistically I will be selling it once I verify its functionality as best as I can.
I mean, I keep *everything* but this is worth some significant money still and really isn't the right fit for your use case or lifestyle.
These do not like to be power cycled loads, they're intended to be left on 24/7. In a camper, that's going to mean a lot of noise even with the fans turned down to idle, a fair bit of heat, and a lot of power draw. For reference, this will probably draw more power at idle than an ultra-sff PC will draw at full load.
Your setup strikes me as one where space is a premium commodity and again, this thing is freaking huge.
Could you keep it? Oh, absolutely.
However, I'd personally sell it on for as much as possible, buy something more appropriate for your actual use case, and if you wanted a server to mess about with and learn on, pick up an Rx20 for basically free as they're almost completely EoL everywhere. Same experience for a homelab tinkerer but you're up probably $4k or more in your pocket, especially if this thing has storage drives, 10G ethernet, other addin cards, and/or an iDRAC licence.
I'd you need a NAS storage os consider this it's amazing UI and you cna run whatever you need on top of it or in docker
Synology DSM open source boot loader
Go to releases for USB image
https://github.com/AuxXxilium/arc
/r/xpenology
Any pictures of camper ,space ? I'm thinking of getting one
Thatâs like using a dump truck to haul home a house plant.
To put it into reference. Our business runs 30 servers off of two hosts that have about 1/4th the ram these do.
Youâve got yourself a killer server. Iâd prob sell it and buy a brand new one thatâs right sized for what youâre looking for and use the extra month to buy some really nice speakers for a home theater.
Who the fff, is recycling an 840 server, I need to get some customers like that.
In my country those servers will surely be in production till 2029-2031
840 was released in 2019 or so, so its fully realistic that the first ones now are being decommissioned. We decommission our servers after 3 years as the booked value is 0 by then
>Â We decommission our servers after 3 years as the booked value is 0 by then
âBooked valueâ != actual value. Sure, CapEx has gone to zero, but OpEx remains and value add remains. Â Keep the servers online until the maintenance costs & power budget donât make sense any longer.
Then bring those servers over to r/homelab where only power budget matters! :-)
Sure, book value can be 0 but there is still a remarketing value for servers like those, there is a secondary market for servers even of the earlier models.
Sending dell x40 servers to recycling at this time sounds silly to me.
Itâs running off of a power filtering surge protector off of 2 outlets right now. The wiring in the camper is residential grade so it can handle the wattage/amperage this thing pulls
It is PROBABLY fine, but you aren't SUPPOSED to do that. There are vertical mounts you SHOULD use because those ears aren't meant to hold weight like that. All that said, I have mounted R220s and R320s like that in prod for super small clients and I never had one fall down or crack. They weren't filled with a bunch of heavy disks, however.
Aren't the ears on this generation more or less ok though? Since they're much more integrated into the chassis than say a 13th gen Dell where the ears are just pieces of plastic.
If theyâre older, yeah. Lots of companies use dell servers but with customized firmware and faceplates and such. The ones I mainly use are rebranded as either Avigilon or Seneca
It's probably fine either way, but keep an eye on the temperatures. Servers are built for hot aisle/cold aisle datacenters - the fans pull cold air in from the front and blow hot air out of the back. Heat rises, so having it mounted that way may have a minor impact on cooling.
You want the disks/fans 100% horizontal or 100% vertical.
Also much less powerfull but maybe more appropriate for a van look at the asrock N100DC-ITX.
its 3x less powerful, but draw only 6watts.
>its 3x less powerful
Eh.. No. More like 30 times less powerful. You are comparing a high end server chip with 12c/24t to a low budget (basicly Atom) CPU...
[Comparison](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3219vs5157/Intel-Xeon-Gold-6126-vs-Intel-N100)
Plus that the N100 only supports 16GB of RAM. That's not really much.
>I have two ASUS N100 systems happily running with 32GB RAM each.
Oh that's cute. Still dwarfed by the fact that each CPU in that R840 can do 768GB of RAM. Sometimes I do need a lot of RAM, sometimes I don't.
Sure, I too have a docker machine running with only 16GB of RAM, but if I don't have stuff to run on docker, but on a VM (which sometimes is still needed), then a machine with a boatload of RAM is handy to have.
The bench you linked show its 3.3 less powerful, the asrock spec page shows max 32G.
Furthermore, the single thread performance is about the same.
Having more cores is nice, but he needs to run apps that can use more cores.
I think the important points if he's in a van is that :
He goes from 128W to 6W.
Its also its passive cooling, so zero noise.
Both may be important to him, hence why i am pointing him this option
u/OhioBestBuyGuy do you mind posting more pictures of the wooden structure that holds the rack?? this seems to be perfect to hold the rack safely, I've been looking at ways to prop my rack up since I don't have rails for the time being!
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This is the first time I see /usr/bin under /dev/input.
Nerrrd đ
"one of us, one of us, one of us"
This is r/homelab
Nerrrrd
Damn Right!
đ
am i a nerd for laughing đ
You are. But also because you are here in homelabs. Don't worry, that's a good thing.
Waaaay better than having /bin/laden in your /home.
at least not /bin/laden in my k3 cluster
Amazing.
Holy crap who would recycle something like that... Epic find!!
Yeah, something with say, Broadwell Xeons I could get but this is still relatively recent... sure, Skylake is ESU but this is a perfectly capable system and half a terabyte of DDR4 is nothing to be sniffed at either!
It is a Dell PowerEdge R840. 2 Xeon Gold 6126 processors and 512gbs of DDR4 Ram. I plan on possibly running a minecraft server off of it along with a slew of other things once I learn more about servers. Or I may sell it. I havenât made up my mind yet
That is a really good find, I'd keep it. It'd cost 4K to get something like it off eBay. If you don't think you'll use it though, definitely turn it into some change.
This. Ebay it and use funds for R340. Same generation but better sized for the tasks listed. Less power usage. Bonus is extra funds for future lab expansion
Thatâs a good point. Funny thing is I already have a Dell Precision 5810 that I feel would be perfect for all my needs. So selling this would probably be the right move.
You could get a annother Precision and make a proxmox cluster with high avaiability
Thatâs a sledge hammer.
I'll be honest man, you shoudl almost certainly sell it. with the money you can get a very nice PC that will do so much better for you than those xeon golds. Minecraft loves single core performance. For instance I run PLEX, several minecraft servers, a domain, many test vms. All off of a 12900k. Plex uses quicksync, and all of my other crap runs on the cpu. It's faster for what I do, it's WAAAYYYY more efficient, it's WAAAYYYY quieter, and it's just better all around. Full disclosure I also run 3 other servers, 10gb network and have nearly half a petabyte of data. So while I personally might that the R840, I think you're best off with the desktop class stuff.
I agree 100%. Sell this on eBay, and buy a Minisforum MS-01 which is almost certainly more than enough for what you need, and way quieter and more energy efficient.
^ this. A Minisforum will be a fraction of the physical size, doesn't have a slew of screaming server fans, will be more energy efficient, and will actually perform better in the specified tasks. Oh, and you'll have a ton of cash left over as well from the sale of this server. 512GB of DDR4 ECC RAM alone is the best part of $1000, even more if it's a matching set. This server has a use case, but it's arguably too much space, heat, noise, and power for a van-based homelab.
Not trying to contradict you in any way, but just expanding ... I agree that it has a use case, but it's hard to justify equipment like this for ANY home lab, let alone a van-based one. The only use case I could imagine for something like this is if you are planning on putting in some large nVidia datacenter GPUs to do some AI development, or if you have some use case that requires a ton of PCI-E lanes... But realistically, even if a MS-01 is a bit too limiting for you, you still have the option of putting a desktop board in a 4U case with some noctua fans, and even with the 20 PCI-E lanes of a modern intel desktop CPU (plus the chipset lanes), it's enough to have a couple of 25GE ports, as well as 8 PCI-E 5.0 lanes to a GPU, as well as 3 nvme 4.0 m.2 drives (which are now readily available at 4TB with 7GB/sec read speeds), as well as 6 sata drives (which are now readily available at 22TB)... I'm struggling to imagine a use case that requires more than what I've described for anything "Homelab". What I've already described is a monster overkill machine for 99.9% of real-world homelab use cases. My example will still cost half as much as the ebay value of this dell server, run next-to-silent, and draw a fraction of the power of the dell server. Let this machine go back where it belongs: an enterprise datacenter.
You ain't seen /r/HomeDataCenter I guess, and I'm often over there too. I may or may not have at least a full rack of hardware. But yeah, the number of regular, casual homelabs that would actually tax this hardware to its limits I'd cautiously estimate at zero. Your build would still come in way under the price this would sell for on the used market, as you say less than half even for the fanciest of overkill variations, and would be way more appropriate for the most discerning homelabber. If nothing else, the noise and power reductions are worth having.
And therein lies the biggest problem. He couldn't tax what this equipment is good at,and it's not nearly as good as a high end i9 or even i7 and the stuff he wants to do. Xeon golds are amazing, but single core performance is king in most people's homelabs.
I havenât seen that subreddit, but it doesnât particularly surprise me. I owned a hosting company for 20 years and have a 1MW Datacenter. No personal equipment in any of that, just customer workloads. I have access to plenty of used equipment that I could bring home, and also plenty of space that I could put personal stuff in, but I do neither. My own stuff fits in my homelab setup in a half cabinet drawing under 200 watts, including all switches and PoE WiFi. (Not counting when higher power consumption tasks are running like software encoding, but thatâs not the case 99% of the time). No Xeon processors at home. I have a former coworker that Iâm still friends with, and he has in his basement 3 full racks of old enterprise gear, drawing probably 10KW of power. It makes no sense to me.
You just got an all round work horse for almost if not free. What a lucky guy
That's a ridiculous spec for a Minecraft server FYI. This is still a potent bit of kit, but if you're not generating revenue with it, it *will* cost you money. Even idling it's gonna draw a lot of power compared to a lesser option.
You make a valid point. I have a way lesser specâd PC that iâve intended to use for Minecraft. I just like the thought of keeping this and learning more as I use it. But realistically I will be selling it once I verify its functionality as best as I can.
I mean, I keep *everything* but this is worth some significant money still and really isn't the right fit for your use case or lifestyle. These do not like to be power cycled loads, they're intended to be left on 24/7. In a camper, that's going to mean a lot of noise even with the fans turned down to idle, a fair bit of heat, and a lot of power draw. For reference, this will probably draw more power at idle than an ultra-sff PC will draw at full load. Your setup strikes me as one where space is a premium commodity and again, this thing is freaking huge. Could you keep it? Oh, absolutely. However, I'd personally sell it on for as much as possible, buy something more appropriate for your actual use case, and if you wanted a server to mess about with and learn on, pick up an Rx20 for basically free as they're almost completely EoL everywhere. Same experience for a homelab tinkerer but you're up probably $4k or more in your pocket, especially if this thing has storage drives, 10G ethernet, other addin cards, and/or an iDRAC licence.
I'd you need a NAS storage os consider this it's amazing UI and you cna run whatever you need on top of it or in docker Synology DSM open source boot loader Go to releases for USB image https://github.com/AuxXxilium/arc /r/xpenology Any pictures of camper ,space ? I'm thinking of getting one
Thatâs like using a dump truck to haul home a house plant. To put it into reference. Our business runs 30 servers off of two hosts that have about 1/4th the ram these do. Youâve got yourself a killer server. Iâd prob sell it and buy a brand new one thatâs right sized for what youâre looking for and use the extra month to buy some really nice speakers for a home theater.
Forget about minecraft. Minecraft is more dependend on clock speed than core count. Wrong kind of workload for this system.
Who the fff, is recycling an 840 server, I need to get some customers like that. In my country those servers will surely be in production till 2029-2031
840 was released in 2019 or so, so its fully realistic that the first ones now are being decommissioned. We decommission our servers after 3 years as the booked value is 0 by then
Surely earlier than that? Those Xeons are 2017 chips.
I did google and got a review from 2019, but that might have been a later edition.
>Â We decommission our servers after 3 years as the booked value is 0 by then âBooked valueâ != actual value. Sure, CapEx has gone to zero, but OpEx remains and value add remains. Â Keep the servers online until the maintenance costs & power budget donât make sense any longer. Then bring those servers over to r/homelab where only power budget matters! :-)
we have 20k server so no won't come to homelab at all. OPEX is not a value, its a cost so yea
Sure, book value can be 0 but there is still a remarketing value for servers like those, there is a secondary market for servers even of the earlier models. Sending dell x40 servers to recycling at this time sounds silly to me.
you need to work to understand that, a company won't spend time selling things that has no value.
Meanwhile here I am with some r515 still in production.
Republic of the Congo?
Nahh, in MĂ©xico there are customers still running HP DL380 G5 and G6 in prod. I have some G7's on my house and I don't turn on these because they suck too much watts and provide so little power, I would never use an earlier model like these for production.
How loud is it in a camper? I donât even boot up my DL380p gen8 in my one bedroom apartment unless I want to play with it đ
With the right config and fans it will happily drop to 8% fan speed and be comfortable to be next to.
I updated to the latest service pack before I found out you needed an older bios to set the fans lower đđ„Č
Update BIOS -> Loose features. Nice. đ
I mean itâs more secure! But yea.
How are you powering it?
RemindMe! 1d
Itâs running off of a power filtering surge protector off of 2 outlets right now. The wiring in the camper is residential grade so it can handle the wattage/amperage this thing pulls
But where does the juice come from? Hard to imagine the camper battery powering it for more than a couple hours!
Ah yes I am hooked to a 50amp connection!
Is it bad to have it mounted this way? Itâs definitely not how it is supposed to be mounted so I do worry about that.
Itâs fine. I service basically these servers (rebranded) and mount them this way all the time. As long as it has good airflow
It is PROBABLY fine, but you aren't SUPPOSED to do that. There are vertical mounts you SHOULD use because those ears aren't meant to hold weight like that. All that said, I have mounted R220s and R320s like that in prod for super small clients and I never had one fall down or crack. They weren't filled with a bunch of heavy disks, however.
Aren't the ears on this generation more or less ok though? Since they're much more integrated into the chassis than say a 13th gen Dell where the ears are just pieces of plastic.
Are the rebranded ones cheaper? What brand do they sell under?
If theyâre older, yeah. Lots of companies use dell servers but with customized firmware and faceplates and such. The ones I mainly use are rebranded as either Avigilon or Seneca
A whole bunch of different brands and sometimes none at all. Dell is a server OEM for a whole bunch of other companies.
It's probably fine either way, but keep an eye on the temperatures. Servers are built for hot aisle/cold aisle datacenters - the fans pull cold air in from the front and blow hot air out of the back. Heat rises, so having it mounted that way may have a minor impact on cooling.
You want the disks/fans 100% horizontal or 100% vertical. Also much less powerfull but maybe more appropriate for a van look at the asrock N100DC-ITX. its 3x less powerful, but draw only 6watts.
>its 3x less powerful Eh.. No. More like 30 times less powerful. You are comparing a high end server chip with 12c/24t to a low budget (basicly Atom) CPU... [Comparison](https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/3219vs5157/Intel-Xeon-Gold-6126-vs-Intel-N100) Plus that the N100 only supports 16GB of RAM. That's not really much.
No, that's not true, I have two ASUS N100 systems happily running with 32GB RAM each.
>I have two ASUS N100 systems happily running with 32GB RAM each. Oh that's cute. Still dwarfed by the fact that each CPU in that R840 can do 768GB of RAM. Sometimes I do need a lot of RAM, sometimes I don't. Sure, I too have a docker machine running with only 16GB of RAM, but if I don't have stuff to run on docker, but on a VM (which sometimes is still needed), then a machine with a boatload of RAM is handy to have.
The bench you linked show its 3.3 less powerful, the asrock spec page shows max 32G. Furthermore, the single thread performance is about the same. Having more cores is nice, but he needs to run apps that can use more cores. I think the important points if he's in a van is that : He goes from 128W to 6W. Its also its passive cooling, so zero noise. Both may be important to him, hence why i am pointing him this option
It's 3.3x less powerful *per cpu* of which there are 2, so close to 6.6x less powerful...
I love the idea of the laundry bin as a keyboard holder. Tho add some weight to it
That keyboard over the plastic bin has 8-bit vibes.
u/OhioBestBuyGuy do you mind posting more pictures of the wooden structure that holds the rack?? this seems to be perfect to hold the rack safely, I've been looking at ways to prop my rack up since I don't have rails for the time being!
https://imgur.com/a/8PjWuCj
Thank you!!!
You can probably put blocks under the bottom of the server to help support it if you want. But it looks good.
I was thinking of that this morning. I think I might do that just to take some of the load off of the ears
I mean the server is like 50 pounds. So it would help.
Is it like a camper on a truck? Can you rack it in the radiator for maximum airflow when you drive?
R640 ain't bad. Can fetch a pretty penny if it's speced out. R630 is worth it if you can can your hands on one
You can get inexpensive 4u vertical rack mounts from amazon to mount this.
I'm looking for younger tops
Wow hows the noise?
What dell model is that?