Feel like living vicariously? I just purchased a fairly loaded HP DL380 Gen7 server. I say loaded because the thing comes with all the guts like dual p/s, lots of ram, 8 SAS drives and their sleds… though not very big ones at 146G but all the slots are full to begin with… so I don’t have to buy a bunch of crap to populate the cabinet. NOW… the question is, what all to do with it? Since I know far less than squat about enterprise grade server gear and the software options to run on it, this will be an adventure. Was thinking a NAS, maybe an in-house web server, a video storage server for a crapload of IP cameras, maybe even a really large paperweight? Since I figure there is at least one IT geek in here, I figure I should toss out a line and see what you guys would do if you had (OR currently have and use) a power consuming brick such as this. If I am building a network, I might as well toss in some serious computing power as well? Why not!
So shoot! I am listening… I am also in Washington State so if anybody is close by and feeling like educating a noob, I volunteer to be that noob.
Sounds pretty nice gear, I went with consumer i7, 16gb ram and now up to 4x3tb drives and 2 SSD drives.
You will want to look at virtual machines, few options like UnRaid, FreeNas, hyper-v, xen etc.
I weighed up unraid and freenas but ended up with UnRaid due to being able to create virtual machines that pass through integrated GPU etc which 1 VM is my office machine saving need for 2 machines. Also have a newly built mycroft VM. You then get dockers which I have about a dozen to do things like web server, MQTT server, nextcloud etc etc
The server has arrived! I am not ready to get knuckles deep in it yet but I figured I would share the details. It is an HP Proliant DL380 Gen 7 and they sent it with both 6 core Xeon 2.8Ghz chips in it, 72G memory,… like almost every slot is populated, 8 total 146G SAS drives on their appropriate sleds and both power supply slots filled with matching 750W hot swap power supplies. I popped the cover and took a look in 'er and it is super clean. The heat sinks for the Xeon’s are spanking shiny clean as with every bit of the rest of this little booger. I wouldn’t think that it has any kind of OS on it since it came from a dealer but… I would love to be happily surprised! Now I just need to find an IT guy willing to dig me out of the weeds when I tinker it to death. I hope to set it up as a NAS but due to the type/size and expense of these tiny SAS drives, I might go with a seperate NAS that will run a more affordable drive. I also want to do some virtualization so I can run other stuff as well. I have been researching setting up a Win 10 virtual so I can do some video editing that can utilize the raw power that this thing has that none of the rest of my computers have. Its what I get for buying bottom of the pile Dell hardware.
