Dell Poweredge R620's - 16/20 Cores - 64/128gb RAM - $200

[oppenheimer]

I am just really starting my HomeLab and wanted to get something that actually supports virtualization (all of the old HP DL3xx G4's that I have are too old to support virtualization) so I went exploring and I found some good deals. I bought one of these myself and wanted to share:


I opted for the one with 2 E5-2660's because that one comes with drives (not a huge deal but a factor).

 

[Cruzader]

I feel scammed... "so I went exploring and I found these amazing deals." and then you link those instead.

 

[applepi]

Not worth the power to run them unless you need a shit ton of RAM

 

[Cruzader]

For that model that was the best I could find, of course I am really only looking on eBay and amazon. If you have any other sites let me know. I am still new in the world of servers and homelabbing.

"r620 128gb" "r720 128gb" "dl380 128gb" etc into ebay gives you quite alot of better cpu listings in the 100-130$ area.
They are missing the spinners from your link but you can buy that for less than the diffrence.

And thats the asking prices, you can offer 20-40$ below that and they will be happy to get it out the door.
The gen above with ddr4 is getting so cheap now that its hard to move the ddr3 stuff.

 

[malloot]

in my opinion anything xeon v2-4 are is not worth it anymore, power costs, low performance, no more bios updates for security patches. Better of buying a more modern system. Epyc Rome/Milan utterly beats these in performance and I3-12000f is still slightly better with way less power use

 

[Magnet]

I know there is some concern here for the old platform, but the good news is RAM should be super cheap along with replacement parts. Its a decent starter and as you advance you can look for bigger/better/newer or more efficient based on your needs/wants. I started with an old desktop, then went to x99/xeon e3 system. I upgraded RAM in that but eventually went (recently) to an Epyc Rome to get loads of PCIe.

Keep in mind, everyone is on their own path and there is no finished/done, as you'll always look to improve, optimize, and build.

Good luck and welcome to homelabbing.

 

[Sacrilego]

I also believe that the Xeon v2-4 are not as attractive as they used to be for my own personal use case. This is especially true for v2 and v3.
ESXI 8 at least is still officially supported on V4. I've moved on to Epyc for trouble free ESXI and W11 support (I'm aware of the requirement bypass tricks for W11).

However, that doesn't mean that I or other people can't use them. One big advantage to these older platforms is price and part availability. I've sold off fairly cheap some v2 systems to users who've outgrown their even older or smaller systems and/or wanted to consolidate.

They still offer decent performance to price ratio. Not everyone needs to run ESXi either. Proxmox, TrueNAS scale (KVM) and Hyper-V all still work great on these and have plenty of PCIe lanes. Heck, I even game on a v3 and oddly enough, power isn't as bad as I thought it would be.

 

[Cruzader]

ESXI 8 at least is still officially supported on V4. I've moved on to Epyc for trouble free ESXI and W11 support (I'm aware of the requirement bypass tricks for W11).

I got a 2U4Node Epyc and rest is v4, on consumption/compute i could live with v4 for a long time yet.
But the lack of bifurcation is a bummer on most v4 platforms, thats mainly what is driving me to start replacing the v4 nodes now.
(+ getting the OCP3 slot)

If using the multinode boxes the step up from v4 to scalable/epyc is getting fairly low costwise for the nodes themself also.

 

[Markess]

R620 isn't a bad system. Its not overly loud for a 1U and if someone is limited on space and wants some density it's not a bad choice for homelab situations where speed isn't necessarily a big factor. As noted above, DDR3 RDIMMs are cheap (I have an R620 & bumped mine & another machine up quite a bit recently at ~$25 per 128GB). CPUs are cheap too. So, someone starting out can get a system with a ton of RAM and lots of cores to play with for relatively cheap. If pics on Amazon are accurate, it looks like they pack them well. And honestly, for a system like these, which are surprisingly heavy for 1U and without original style packaging, that's a selling point even if it costs a bit more. 600GB drives...personally, I wouldn't bother with 10K drives at this point, but kind of nice to have something to start with?

But, that having been said, not sure this is the greatest price for what you're getting? Also as noted above, these are getting old enough that some of the newer OS & program innovations (that I'd want to tinker with as a homelabber) aren't going to be compatible. If I were needing a starter system, I'd think this would be a nicer choice (my opinion only and not associated with either of the OPs). https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/lenovo-thinkstation-nice-server-workstation.40377/. Fairly similar price and a couple generations newer. And while the Xeon W-2135 has less cores to play with, its going to have more computing power. Plus, for a new homelabber, the tower case may be an easier fit?

Just my opinion. Cheers.

 

[nutsnax]

I got a 2U4Node Epyc and rest is v4, on consumption/compute i could live with v4 for a long time yet.
But the lack of bifurcation is a bummer on most v4 platforms, thats mainly what is driving me to start replacing the v4 nodes now.
(+ getting the OCP3 slot)

If using the multinode boxes the step up from v4 to scalable/epyc is getting fairly low costwise for the nodes themself also.

Where did you get the 2u 4 node Epyc and how much?

 

[Patriot]

Reported as spam and its a tossup... bad deal, perhaps entry lvl IT.