Will this be overkill or otherwise not recommended for someone who is new and just starting to learn?
My goal is to have something I can grow into, but initially I’d like to host a few VMs, game servers, and a have place to store content. I’d also like to host a PLEX server in the future as well but might buy a separate piece of hardware for it specifically down the road. Thanks in advance for taking the time to help a newbie!
$400 for that seems steep. Go look for an HP Z440 workstation as cheap as possible and upgrade it. A 12 core E5 v4 cpu is literally $5 and you should be able to pickup a chassis with cpu and like 8gb ram for ~$120. Then for $10 a stick but as many 16gb ddr4 ecc dimms as you want.
For $400 or less you could get 12 much faster newer cores, a basically silent workstation that idles under 100w and 192gb ddr4
If your are a shareholder at your local power provider… Or just recicle some hardware lying around any PC, laptop ou small form factor would do the job without a portion of the noise or power consumption, just a guy that runs a similar setup once a week as a redundant backup.
Might be overkill, but who cares! That price’s a steal!
I can tell you from direct experience if owning an R720XD, this bitch is loud, and hot. During the summer, AC stays on 90% of the time near max cooling, during the winter, I have no use for a heater because I already have one lmao. Power consumption is about the 250-400w constantly with HDDs with SSDs it would probably be a bit lower, but I’m sure I’m paying about 100 to 150 dollars more a year, but luckily I’m not worried about power consumption or price. If you don’t care about heat, noise, and power consumption, so far, I really enjoy it! Check out my latest post where I detailed my whole current setup.
As others have said, there are way better options out there than the 720. In terms of literally everything lol. You could probably spend a couple extra 200 bucks and get something way newer, efficient, quieter, and more or equally as powerful. Let me know if you have any questions, I live with one in my bedroom lol
I’m happy to spend that much extra for better performance, especially if it helps avoid the long run annoyance of the heat and noise.
What would you recommend I keep my eye out for as an alternative?
Well first I think it’d be better to ask you first, what do you plan on using it for? Do you already know what you want to do with it? If not, I would do as others have suggested. Hold back on a rack mounted server for a while, grab a desktop, load it with ram HDDs (or SSDs) put proxmox on it, and tinker with it there. Once you’ve got that itch to buy more, then now at least you’ll know what you need.
My use case is, running some core VMs and LXCs that will run 24/7 along with later down the line some VMs that I’ll use for learning Active Directory and performing red and blue team activities on them.
I agree with people on here talking about buying a NUC type box and using that. It’s likely to be as powerful or more powerful than the 720, low power usage, basically non existent noise, but you’ll be missing out in storage and RAM. The cool part is, let’s say you do get a NUC, play with it for a year and then you want to buy more, you can always repurpose the old NUC for some other use. There’s also NUCs with dual gigabit/ 2.5 gigabit NICs in them, if you plan ahead for it’s repurposing, you could convert it into a very nice router for your network. One WAN and one LAN for your home, then use a switch of some sort to give the rest of your devices connectivity.
But back to what I asked, what do you want to do with the hardware? If you don’t have a clue, look at YouTube and search for other people’s home lab setups, there’s a variety, from purely entertainment like Plex and jellyfin to stream movies across their network, to a security lab for learning AD. Find what you want first, then build what you need for what you want.
I won’t be doing anything too crazy with them, just hosting some Valheim, a PLEX server, and a couple VMs for now
If you have something laying around, you should start there until you know you’ll need more power/functionality. I got into homelabing/self hosting with two of these r720s I got for free. They’re awesome. I’m running multiple VMs, lxc containers, a NAS, and my power consumption is about 175 watts per r720. But my power bill is $0.11/kWh.
I have been thinking about this myself.
The question I have is there any reason to get a rack server?
Also, would it make sense to get multiple and put them in a cluster?
Are any rackmount servers low power? or is this just an unrealistic expectation.
No server is overkill If you want it can afford or and can deal with the Energy consumption
I have 3 servers. 2 R620 and 1 R630. The fans are loud before post but after they are quite quiet. I have them in my garage so noise/heat is not an issue for me nor it the power consumption. If I were in EU that would be a different conversation. I run Proxmox on them in a cluster and nested 7 ESXi “servers” along with a bunch of other LXCs and VMs. I don’t think it’s a huge investment for less than $400. You could flash that H710p to IT mode and have the TruNas ( or any other one ) manage your HDDs.
Also at the same time reduce the fan speed. You can have so much fun and functionality with it. Keep in mind the everything resides on 1 physical server and you will not have any redundancy. However, Proxmox, ESXi and the like need at least 2(+ witnesses) or 3 to allow you High Availability ( HA ) and to be able to move your VMs. Having 1 hypervisor on the bare bones and nesting ( installing other Hypervisors) under it you could create a hell of a lab.