Okay, so I've gotten some questions regarding the power consumption with the t730/N40L combination. So over the holidays break I got around to installing a few Etekcity Voltson "smart" outlets (think of them as a cheap PDU with power monitoring functionality), so here's a quick writeup -
So here they are being installed, one for each device. The Powerline AV1200 adapter is connected to a rather scrawny cable that really should be replaced ASAP. I was told that the Voltsons should give a fairly accurate (if slightly high) power reading.
Here's the Voltson smart outlets on the Vesync app (not that great, honestly)
Okay, so to reiterate:
The t730 has 32GB of RAM, a 32GB Sandisk SSD, and a Solarflare SFN-5122F 10GbE adapter running VMWare ESXi 6.5U2.
The N40L has 16GB of RAM, a 16GB Toshiba USB drive for the FreeNAS 11.1U6 boot media, 4 4TB HGST (Western Digital) Deskstar NAS 7200rpm drives running zraid1 (basically RAID5 for zfs) and a SolarFlare Flareon SFN-7322 10GbE adapter.
So what does average idle looks like on the t730 (on the outlet level)? Going by the Voltson, about 30w:
What about the N40L?
About 70-75w:
Keep in mind that the t730 does not expose any power saving features to ESXi 6.5U2, nor is the BIOS setup to save power. The same goes for the N40L and FreeNAS. The t730 is using the N40L as an iSCSI target.
Now, what happens if you load the machine up? (let's say that 6 of the 8 Linux VMs hosted on the t730 ran something like stress -c 6 -hdd 4 to thrash both CPU cycles and HDD utilization)
On the t730, it can get as high as 54w in total:
While on the N40L, the disk thrashing caused the power utilization to spike up to 91w. However, once the load has been taken off, recovery back to 70w doesn't take long at all.