Help me on where to start.

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Sean Ho

seanho.com
Nov 19, 2019
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Vancouver, BC
seanho.com
Sure, I can understand if your goal is not to deliver end services cost-effectively but rather to fully utilize your existing hardware. My suggestion is that you can do both -- having a stable and performant platform for daily services (e.g., Plex and VDI) frees you up to experiment with ProxMox on the blades, with the flexibility to shift workload over as you gain confidence, and the safety of being able to fallback to a known-good solution.
 

Oldhome7

Member
Feb 9, 2020
71
23
8
Sure, I can understand if your goal is not to deliver end services cost-effectively but rather to fully utilize your existing hardware. My suggestion is that you can do both -- having a stable and performant platform for daily services (e.g., Plex and VDI) frees you up to experiment with ProxMox on the blades, with the flexibility to shift workload over as you gain confidence, and the safety of being able to fallback to a known-good solution.
I don't currently run VDIs, everything is done bare metal on the X10D, and it's working fine. I just think it's time for everybody to have their own spaces to work in, not everybody can be on the X10D at once currently.

I could very well just build out desktops for everybody's needs but I just see all this hardware and want to try a proof of concept type thing for me as it's all foreign and I've never done it. I don't want to go out and buy all this "super efficient" hardware that everybody keeps mentioning and then realize that it's not what I want to do when I could have spent that money on individual builds for everybody.
 

discoeels

Member
May 8, 2013
40
7
8
I could very well just build out desktops for everybody's needs but I just see all this hardware and want to try a proof of concept type thing for me as it's all foreign and I've never done it. I don't want to go out and buy all this "super efficient" hardware that everybody keeps mentioning and then realize that it's not what I want to do when I could have spent that money on individual builds for everybody.
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Ijs, the new Ryzen APUs look nice.
 

Oldhome7

Member
Feb 9, 2020
71
23
8
I will agree with that, and the newer i3 is turning out pretty well too. Plus Intel getting into the GPU game. Like I said, I'm not against building out something for everybody but, I like the idea of all the thermals, battery backups, storage, etc. all centralized.
 

Oldhome7

Member
Feb 9, 2020
71
23
8
So I've got a little update now that we've settled into the new house a bit.

I've since acquired a free APC NetShelter rack with a couple IBM PDUs and a 3com 24 port unmanaged switch. I found and bought a pair of Cisco 2960S 48 port gigabit switches for $30 a piece. I also went a little more energy efficient with an HP ML350P G8 that came with a single E5-2620 v1 and 16gb of RAM, unfortunately it's only got a single 8x SFF hard drive cage but that should do for now.

Haven't had a chance to power everything up as we're wiring up the server room now. But, I think that HP will handle my needs, even if I need to add a second CPU or swap in a couple V2's and bump up the RAM capacity.
 

Sean Ho

seanho.com
Nov 19, 2019
768
352
63
Vancouver, BC
seanho.com
So I've got a little update now that we've settled into the new house a bit.

I've since acquired a free APC NetShelter rack with a couple IBM PDUs and a 3com 24 port unmanaged switch. I found and bought a pair of Cisco 2960S 48 port gigabit switches for $30 a piece. I also went a little more energy efficient with an HP ML350P G8 that came with a single E5-2620 v1 and 16gb of RAM, unfortunately it's only got a single 8x SFF hard drive cage but that should do for now.

Haven't had a chance to power everything up as we're wiring up the server room now. But, I think that HP will handle my needs, even if I need to add a second CPU or swap in a couple V2's and bump up the RAM capacity.

Good plan! E5 v2 are super super cheap on ebay nowadays.
 

Oldhome7

Member
Feb 9, 2020
71
23
8
I've got a couple V2's local to me for pretty cheap on Facebook. I only spent $160 on the HP. The only downside I've read so far is that the P420i is particular when it comes to drives. Hopefully it'll play nice with at least one of the spare laptop drives I've got laying around so I can test the system out past POST before grabbing a couple HBA cards and the other drive cages.
 

Oldhome7

Member
Feb 9, 2020
71
23
8
As we're finishing up things, I've started to fiddle with the ML350p and have ordered a few parts for it. Now that leads me to a couple questions, I've read the P420i is temperamental about 3rd party drives so I plan on throwing in the 9270-8i I have laying around. Is it also the P420i that's temperamental about the drive carriers as well? I've ordered a few to go with the drives I bought but I don't think they're genuine HP parts.

Also, I grabbed 8x Toshiba 600gb 10k drives. I'm thinking of Raid 10, but I'm open to suggestions, it's mainly going to be the OS storage for proxmox and maybe the VMs as well with separate storage for actual data in the VMs.