Greetings all. I recently received for disposal 4 old Dell servers which are obsolete for the company's use, so rather than dispose of them in a landfill, I'd like to repurpose them if possible, so need a suggestion or two.
#1: Dell T320 desktop server. 1x Xeon E5-1410 v2 w 96gb ECC ram. Originally 2012R2
PERC H710P adapter with 2x Toshiba 300gb and 6x Seagate 1tb 2.5 inch drives (installed in 8x 3.5inch adapters in hot swap caddies). I have already destroyed the RAID arrays on it and flashed the firmware to IT mode so it will be ZFS usable. I have already run dban autonuke on all the disks so they are cleared, but I am thinking of moving my main file server disks from their existing i5-2500k w/16gb ram and an IBM M1015 8port adapter of 6x8tb WD in RAIDZFS-2 array of 32Tb. The cpubenchmark going from 2500k to E5-1410v2 bumps from 4119 to 5715, but more importantly, the ram jumps to a whopping 96Gb. So, it would be killer for ZFS. Last I recall, moving the disks over to a new motherboard wasn't an issue under old TrueNAS Core, but I'm running Scale on it now, and I don't recall the hardware change being an issue, but will need to verify it.
#2: Dell Precision T1700 desktop server. 1x Xeon E3-1270 v3 w/ 32Gb ram. (2 units received, but one won't boot BIOS and gives constant beep error code)
This is just a desktop box for all intents and purposes other than being a Xeon w/32gb. If I can manage to fit 6x2Tb disks (my original FreeNAS 0.7x WD20EARS GREEN model disks) into the Dell case, then it will make a handy little small file server despite the small size of 2Tb disks, and the cpu would be way better than the Athlon II X2 240 in it (1032 vs 7292 cpu benchmark rating).. But, I might not be able to get 6 disks to fit in the chassis. Will have to look into it and see if possible. At least I could make it into something like a storage location for ISOs, Acronis backups, that sort of thing. Originally RAID ZFS-2 for 8tb total, but I'd probably make it ZFS1 going forward for the extra 2tb disk. Any suggestions here are appreciated as to a tertiary server role other than a direct media file server.
#3 Dell PowerEdge R920 4U rackmount server. 4x Xeon E7-4850 v2 (12 core cpu x4 = 48 cores total) w/ 128gb ECC ram (iirc PC3-12800) quad 1100w power supplies.
PERC H730P adapter with 24 2.5 inch SFF hot swap caddies, but only 18 bays populated with 1Tb disks. One of the disks has failed, so I'd likely not replace it, or order a fleabay $20 used disk to replace it. I could move the 6x disks from the T320 plus replace dead unit for a total combined 24x 1Tb disks. It's a MONSTER box. It weighs over a hundred pounds, so I don't think I really want to put it in my garage and pay the electric bill to run a Quad Xeon with 24 disks in it. I would much rather like to get permission to install it at work's POP rack in an AC control room where I don't have to worry about a power bill. It was originally set for a dual boot raid1 virtual disk with the remaining 16 disks in a raid6 array. I have not yet destroyed the virtual disks or dban autonuked the disks in anticipation of usage, and the H730P is still running the Dell raid firmware. What should I do with this thing?
The R920 is a peculiar beast. With 48 Xeon cores, even being 10 years old or so, it still has a lot of computational power. cpubenchmark.net doesn't even have a benchmark of the Xeon 4850v2 cpu to give me a reference of how fast these old chips even are. I could potentially offer it up to work and just install linux or Xen (XCP-ng I think?) and migrate ALL work VMs to this thing and decommission all the other rotgut misfit boxes that are 1U of different makes/models...
Or, I could USE this thing for something interesting. If I populate this box with 24 physical 1Tb disks, it's not a huge amount of storage space combined, but it's still a large number of disks to spread data around, so running VMs on it would be quick in terms of ram/cpu as well as disk I/O. I certainly do NOT intend to spend any money purchasing SSDs to populate 24 caddies! Optimizing this box for free (or cheap) is really my goal. But what to do, what to do? These boxes are designed to run up to a whopping 6TB of RAM in them for massive database loads or similar things, tho it only has 128 gigs, ram kits are not particularly expensive on fleabay. I could add another 128 gigs for under a hundred bucks, or I could replace the dd3 for dd3L ram instead for better overall ram options. I'd be up for upgrading it to 256 or 384 ram just because, but have no real need to go beyond that. Hell, Used Xeons are so cheap on fleabay, I could even look into upgrading existing chips with the best the mobos will support, and they will likely still be under $50 each if so.
So, what are your suggestions for repurposing this R920 4U rack box? Just load all 24 disks into a single raid array and install Xen and then create some VMs for an array of purposes? Load Linux directly and do all KVM stuff? It's such a beefy box, I'm having trouble deciding what to even do with it because it will be underutilized no matter what I come up with. Maybe it should be repurposed as a node on one of the crypto networks for cpu or something like that... Who knows... Please give me some options here.
#1: Dell T320 desktop server. 1x Xeon E5-1410 v2 w 96gb ECC ram. Originally 2012R2
PERC H710P adapter with 2x Toshiba 300gb and 6x Seagate 1tb 2.5 inch drives (installed in 8x 3.5inch adapters in hot swap caddies). I have already destroyed the RAID arrays on it and flashed the firmware to IT mode so it will be ZFS usable. I have already run dban autonuke on all the disks so they are cleared, but I am thinking of moving my main file server disks from their existing i5-2500k w/16gb ram and an IBM M1015 8port adapter of 6x8tb WD in RAIDZFS-2 array of 32Tb. The cpubenchmark going from 2500k to E5-1410v2 bumps from 4119 to 5715, but more importantly, the ram jumps to a whopping 96Gb. So, it would be killer for ZFS. Last I recall, moving the disks over to a new motherboard wasn't an issue under old TrueNAS Core, but I'm running Scale on it now, and I don't recall the hardware change being an issue, but will need to verify it.
#2: Dell Precision T1700 desktop server. 1x Xeon E3-1270 v3 w/ 32Gb ram. (2 units received, but one won't boot BIOS and gives constant beep error code)
This is just a desktop box for all intents and purposes other than being a Xeon w/32gb. If I can manage to fit 6x2Tb disks (my original FreeNAS 0.7x WD20EARS GREEN model disks) into the Dell case, then it will make a handy little small file server despite the small size of 2Tb disks, and the cpu would be way better than the Athlon II X2 240 in it (1032 vs 7292 cpu benchmark rating).. But, I might not be able to get 6 disks to fit in the chassis. Will have to look into it and see if possible. At least I could make it into something like a storage location for ISOs, Acronis backups, that sort of thing. Originally RAID ZFS-2 for 8tb total, but I'd probably make it ZFS1 going forward for the extra 2tb disk. Any suggestions here are appreciated as to a tertiary server role other than a direct media file server.
#3 Dell PowerEdge R920 4U rackmount server. 4x Xeon E7-4850 v2 (12 core cpu x4 = 48 cores total) w/ 128gb ECC ram (iirc PC3-12800) quad 1100w power supplies.
PERC H730P adapter with 24 2.5 inch SFF hot swap caddies, but only 18 bays populated with 1Tb disks. One of the disks has failed, so I'd likely not replace it, or order a fleabay $20 used disk to replace it. I could move the 6x disks from the T320 plus replace dead unit for a total combined 24x 1Tb disks. It's a MONSTER box. It weighs over a hundred pounds, so I don't think I really want to put it in my garage and pay the electric bill to run a Quad Xeon with 24 disks in it. I would much rather like to get permission to install it at work's POP rack in an AC control room where I don't have to worry about a power bill. It was originally set for a dual boot raid1 virtual disk with the remaining 16 disks in a raid6 array. I have not yet destroyed the virtual disks or dban autonuked the disks in anticipation of usage, and the H730P is still running the Dell raid firmware. What should I do with this thing?
The R920 is a peculiar beast. With 48 Xeon cores, even being 10 years old or so, it still has a lot of computational power. cpubenchmark.net doesn't even have a benchmark of the Xeon 4850v2 cpu to give me a reference of how fast these old chips even are. I could potentially offer it up to work and just install linux or Xen (XCP-ng I think?) and migrate ALL work VMs to this thing and decommission all the other rotgut misfit boxes that are 1U of different makes/models...
Or, I could USE this thing for something interesting. If I populate this box with 24 physical 1Tb disks, it's not a huge amount of storage space combined, but it's still a large number of disks to spread data around, so running VMs on it would be quick in terms of ram/cpu as well as disk I/O. I certainly do NOT intend to spend any money purchasing SSDs to populate 24 caddies! Optimizing this box for free (or cheap) is really my goal. But what to do, what to do? These boxes are designed to run up to a whopping 6TB of RAM in them for massive database loads or similar things, tho it only has 128 gigs, ram kits are not particularly expensive on fleabay. I could add another 128 gigs for under a hundred bucks, or I could replace the dd3 for dd3L ram instead for better overall ram options. I'd be up for upgrading it to 256 or 384 ram just because, but have no real need to go beyond that. Hell, Used Xeons are so cheap on fleabay, I could even look into upgrading existing chips with the best the mobos will support, and they will likely still be under $50 each if so.
So, what are your suggestions for repurposing this R920 4U rack box? Just load all 24 disks into a single raid array and install Xen and then create some VMs for an array of purposes? Load Linux directly and do all KVM stuff? It's such a beefy box, I'm having trouble deciding what to even do with it because it will be underutilized no matter what I come up with. Maybe it should be repurposed as a node on one of the crypto networks for cpu or something like that... Who knows... Please give me some options here.