Author: sgeorge, Posted on: 4 November 2017 11:22
The homelab landscape.. I've outgrown trying to run some apps on my ASUSTOR Nas, so its time to move to a dedicated server.
I've also noticed that my DNS server, which is a Raspberry PI running unbound is lagging a lot, I think its very memory starved.
So... the solution I came up with was to buy a Dell R710 2U server with 128GB ram and dual CPU... that would be about 700$ without disks, in the meantime, an identical CPU 1U rack came into my possession.
A small SuperMicro 1U chassis 813MTQ-350CB, running a X8DTL-iF motherboard with dual L5640 Xeon CPU (2.2ghz), these are low power 65W that I specced the R710 with (I dont need super power hog 120w per cpu for something that most of the time will idle away). The L5640 are 6 core, 12 thread CPU, so I have 12 core, 24 thread at my disposal.
The only downside with the SuperMicro, it has 24gb ram but should be good to start off with, I can upgrade to 96gb if there is need to do so.
The plan is to put ProxMox on and run a couple of small VMs.
I will blog more later as I've got some setup to do.
I grabbed off ebay for $5, an identical Broadcom BCM5709C which is a quad port gigabit pci-e network card. I do need to get a full size bracket as it has a half size bracket and the supermicro chassis needs a full size one.
This will give me 6 gigabit ethernet ports in total for VM usage, I'll probably use the 4 on the BCM5709C as dedicated ones and the two on the motherboard as shared virtual ones.
The other thing I needed to do was track down a riser card as you cant obviouslt install PCI-e cards in vertical slots on a 1U rack, you need a sideways riser adapter! So I grabbed one of those too.
tags: Homelab
(dont include links in your comments.)