Cheap and Powerful Home Virtual Server - $300 GETS YOU A TON OF POWER!

[@WDCallahan]

And it only costs $300! If you don't count the $4000 of hardware we already had lying around...

[@shadowmasterlord]

and then you open ebay and for 300 is only mb with cpus or for 400 with one weaker cpu :D

[@TwoWarPlayers]

I dont know the electricity cost in the US but in Germany it would cost me a asset. ~ 35 Cent per kWh Edit: So the Internet says 13.19 Cents in the US.

[@erroronetwofour1261]

@@shadowmasterlord presne tak ako hovoríš 😂

[@ashtreylil1]

Dell Precision T7600 16-Core 2x Intel E5-2680 with 64 GB ram - $400 + $55 shipping DELL PRECISION T7600 1300W POWER SUPPLY - $50 + $16 shipping AC Power Supply Cord Cable 4 Dell Precision - $8 + $3 shipping XPG LITE SX6000 Series: 512GB Internal PCIe Gen3x4 (NVMe) - $66 M.2 NVMe SSD to PCIe X4 Adapter - $20 Samsung 860 EVO 500GB 2.5 SATA III - 8 x $85 ($680) Athena Power BP-15827SAC an 1 x 5.25" External Drive Bay to 8 x 2.5" - $65 Cable Matters Internal Mini SAS to SATA Cable - $12 Seagate ST5000DM000 5TB Internal 5900RPM 3.5" HDD Lot of 4 - $275 + $9 shipping Total - $1660..... So 1360 dollars over or 5.5x the ammount presented in this $300 server. The extra 5tb drive can be used for backup of the SSDs and NVMe capacity (4tb with raid 5) while the other three can be in raid 5 (10tb). This only gives you space for one complete backup of of the fast storage and with the other 3 5tb drives in raid 5 you have resiliency but no backups. Total capacity would be about 14tb in this config. This is without a $1,000 1080ti if you want to do rendering. Just the extra hardware is $1,120 aside from the server, assuming you find one with 64gb of ram and 2 xenons 64GB (4 x 16GB) DDR3 PC3-8500R - $86 Intel Xeon E5-2680 2.7GHz 20MB 8-Core 2 x 52 ($104) If you include the NAS shown in video and asssuming you want 5x capacity (70tb) for backups it adds an extra $3,660 Synology 12 bay NAS DiskStation DS2419+ - $1500 Seagate IronWolf 6TB NAS Internal Hard Drive - 12 x 180 ($2,160) Bringing total cost to $5,320 with the parts used. Without power consumption. I understand that this isn't a build video and it's essentially just saying look what I built for the channel but this could have easily been titled "building the "bigboi" virtual server" without the mention of cheap or modest or anything that implies that this is affordable. Yes you can get a ton of power out of a sub $500 server and that is freaking amazing but without storage that power is applied to nothing.

[@2GuysTek]

On the west coast of the US where we are it's $.11/kWh

[@georgeandrews2839]

Here I was proud of my budget build... $152 for a quad core I5 3.1 ghz Lenovo tower with 16 gb of ram and 500gb hard drive and windows 10.

[@2GuysTek]

Still be proud! If it serves its purpose for your needs then that’s great!

[@metallicapirate]

I think everyone else is echoing the same feelings: This video is misleading. It definitely cost more than $300 to build this computer, they're just not including the cost of the parts they "already had lying around".

[@GRBtutorials]

How is it misleading if $300 gets you a dual Sandy Bridge Xeon machine with 16 GB (upgradeable to 512 GB!) of RAM and a 500 GB HDD? That's what I call a good deal, and plenty for most people.

[@metallicapirate]

@@GRBtutorials because you're not factoring in that people probably don't already have that chip, that RAM, etc. You used a lot of parts and supplies that didn't come with the $300 purchase from eBay...

[@GRBtutorials]

Jeremy Graslie No, they said it was all included in the price. They upgraded the RAM to 64 GB because of their requirements, but 16 GB were included (2:15), and the Xeons were included as well.

[@oliverrogers6009]

Configured 2x 2Tb hdd, 64gb ram and 3gb gpu for $355

[@todddelozier8172]

I just looked for this exact build. Im seeing a ton of bare bones builds.

[@cheesefries7436]

That little SSD caddy is so cool

[@GutnarmEVE]

high-end workstations make for perfect SOHO servers: great performance and reliability, (usually) easily serviceable, and spare parts readily available. and: you don't need hearing protection if it lives in a closet next to your desk. if uptime and redundancy isn't your main concern, you can squeeze a lot of performance out of them for quite little money.

[@2GuysTek]

Couldn’t have said it better!

[@GutnarmEVE]

@@IJoeAceJRI ofcourse you can; the hardware surrounding it (in that weight class, mind you) will just go "thanks for all the fish" in a few months - while running, and you depending on it

[@GutnarmEVE]

@@IJoeAceJRI generally, it's not the CPU that burns down, but a power supply, a disk controller fails, stuff like that. neither is a problem if you have hardware redundancy (edit #3, sorry.) of course you could run a server with a 1600 on a decent mobo and you'd be fine. but you couldn't run it with a terabyte of error-correcting RAM and at 100% load, 24/7, for years. "home NAS" vs "business machine, needs to make money"

[@jroc151]

I lucked out and was given 5 Dell T3600s. Went out found some server RAM on ebay and got these puppies running in a vSAN cluster at home.😎

[@2GuysTek]

That’s great! We originally were thinking about using T3600s!

[@DumbSkippy]

I'm new. Haven't seen you before. I like your fast moving pace and have subscribed, Thanks a million . Kudos and muchas gracias !

[@2GuysTek]

Glad you enjoyed it! Thanks for subscribing!

[@brockwilkie9990]

same situation here! looking forward to seeing everything else you guys have!

[@lutherhill2405]

@@2GuysTek I want to build this out for a Data Science personal work station. What kind of Nvidia graphics cards can I put on this? Preferably two of them, with each one having 12gb ram

[@2GuysTek]

@@lutherhill2405 there are a ton of 16x PCIe slots in this chassis, so you could easily throw two RTX Titans into this box and power them without an issue. The PSU is rated at 1300W so even with two giant cards consuming wattage, you'll have a lot of power budget left over!

[@lutherhill2405]

2GuysTek excellent thanks. I will definitely be building this out over the next year.

[@Harrisboyuno]

Can't tell you how helpful this video was. I had a come up on a T7610 from work. Our PACS department was tossing one of these pc's. Came with quad DP card and SAS card with 3x2TB SAS drives. Added another 10c Xeon and 128GB of RAM. Now I am able to run 10 - 15 VM's with no issue.

[@2GuysTek]

Awesome! Glad you found the video and that it helped! Consider subscribing!

[@pyrielrising4338]

This is smart....so many tech channels advocate building servers with new parts when there is so much that can be had on secondary markets. Server parts that once cost thousands of dollars can be picked up for a few hundred today. It makes absolutely no sense to run out and buy brand new when gear that has worked for the last decade can be had for pennies on the dollar. Well done.

[@2GuysTek]

Thanks for the comment and watching! We think the same thing!

[@denny-lp1qb]

And here I am, with my Desktop PC with 16Gigs, a FX8350 and a GTX960(4Gb). VMWare workstation with 9 VMs always running. I wish I could have that much RAM :(

[@h2oaddict28]

Upgrade to am4

[@bertnijhof5413]

I like your hardware and as a Dutchman I love the reuse of existing hardware. I use Ubuntu 21.10, OpenZFS 2.0 and Virtualbox 6.1 to store my virtual machines. My hardware ($349) is modest a Ryzen 3 2200G; 16GB (3000MHz); 512GB SP nvme-SSD (3400/2300MB/s) and from the previous PC a 128GB SP sata-SSD and 2 HDDs 500GB Seagate and 1TB WD Black. I can run 2 modern Windows VMs or 4 Linux VMs at the same time. I also have 3 tier storage in 3 datapools for my VMs: - The 14 most frequently used VMs use the high performance storage with a 2 level storage hierarchy; the L1ARC 4GB memory cache and the nvme-SSD. - The 27 VMs, still receiving updates, are on a 3 level storage hierarchy; the same 4GB L1ARC; 90GB L2ARC (read cache) + 5GB ZIL (sync write cache) on sata-SSD and 2 x 500GB HDD partitions in Raid-0. Here I also store my personal data in a separate dataset, but with copies=2, so all my data is stored on both HDDs, a kind of Raid-1 subset inside Raid-0. - The 29 VMs, that are not receiving updates anymore, are also on a 3 level storage hierarchy; the same 4GB L1ARC; 30GB L2ARC + 3GB ZIL on the same sata-SSD and a 500GB partition at the end of the 1TB HDD. Note that all storage and all caches are lz4 compressed and the compression ratio is ~2.0. My VMs are a mix of distro-hopping and collecting OSes. As collector I have all Windows releases from 1.04 to 11 and the Ubuntu releases 4.10, 5.04; all LTS releases and the development edition for 22.04. As distro-hopper I have Garuda-Linux; Manjaro; Fedora; OpenSUSE; Linux Mint; Xubuntu; etc etc. I have an very cheap backup-server built of leftover parts and I added a new power-supply ($18): - a Pentium 4 HT (1C2T; 3.0GHz); 2GB DDR (400MHz) and 4 HDDs in total 1.21TB (2 x 3.5" IDE 250+320GB and 2 x 2.5" SATA-1 320+320GB) running 32-bits FreeBSD 13.0 on OpenZFS :)

[@JGcd001]

Great quality video, I'd be curious to see it in action with a small tour of your VM's. I've never seen a host running more than 4 at a time, so this would be some quality entertainment! ;)

[@2GuysTek]

This is a great idea! Let’s see what we can do in the future! Thanks for the suggestion!

[@RNMSC]

I added a pair of virtual machine servers. Pretty much identical. Since they are expected to do the major lifting here, I named them Hans and Franz.

[@2GuysTek]

Love it! They will *CLAP* pump you up!

[@jimbendtsen8841]

I did that with a T5610. 128GB ram. You can boot off NVME if you use Clover on a USB.

[@GregariousDudeGaming]

Amazing video! You guys are the best! Cannot stop recommending you guys enough! Keep up the awesome work and content!

[@dodusuau]

where to get the 8 disk drive bay from???

[@AchwaqKhalid]

I second this question...

[@dodusuau]

@@AchwaqKhalid I found it here the links www.ebay.com/itm/293199542565 www.amazon.com/dp/B00TL4US8K/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_u9amFb1DV8AHK

[@HafzaProductions2019]

Great workstation.

[@chempranav]

Loved your 8x 2.5" bay hack. what's the name of the product? Does it fit to replace CD ROM drive?

[@patrickregis1]

300$,, a short googling on various refurb, second hand site will tell the truth...

[@rfrancoi]

Excellent video; very informative.

[@2GuysTek]

Glad you enjoyed it!

[@ZoruaZorroark]

it seems like the price for these bad boys has risen since the making of the vid, and by no small amount

[@2GuysTek]

Sadly enough that’s EXACTLY what happened!

[@TYX8926]

Great job on this build. Why is this channel underrated? It should be famous!

[@2GuysTek]

Thanks for watching!

[@TYX8926]

@@2GuysTek You're welcome. :) Hope you'll get more fans coming in.

[@janegerrard1073]

My budget is good for brand new servers but we also buy those used Dell workstations to do the desktop stuff. You can build and evaluate pre-deployment VMs with ease and the hardware is almost infallible. It's not just the power you get a desktop built like a server and for the money it's crazy not to buy them.

[@2GuysTek]

Exactly!

[@nonegiven2830]

ebay and government auctions are always a good for old enterprise tech

[@2GuysTek]

And local e-cyclers as well! Thanks for the comment!

[@spieldings]

Hey, yes this is more what I need. The new expensive stuff is easy to get, but your build is awesome! Nice thought.

[@thorium9190]

Got an Awesome deal on a Dual Xeon E5-2650 V2 Dell Precision T5610. For total of 16 cores and 32 threads for 70 bucks! The issue was the motherboard sata controller. Easily fixed with using a pcie sata card.

[@adamsiek6438]

Things like this are perfect I'd love to see more videos working on servers keep it up guys. New sub

[@juri14111996]

please look at other channels to, the make some stuff the wrong way.

[@adamsiek6438]

@@juri14111996 huh?

[@juri14111996]

@@adamsiek6438 kzbin.info The have great videos about freenas and xcp-ng.

[@adamsiek6438]

@@juri14111996Oh I am. Not concerned about learning, from the video. I'm in IT with tons of certs. If I was going to set something up I would read the docs. Videos are great, but no one video will cover everything. I'm just was entertained by it.

[@tjlambaes]

I did something like this a few months ago. I did not upgrade mine like you guys did. I have so many ideas now.

[@2GuysTek]

Awesome! Good luck!

[@LowJackAP]

straight savage!! Great video guys a lot of good ideas.

[@drkcodeman]

I have a Dell R710, I got for around $200 I upgraded the shitty raid controller to a H200 to support sata 3 speeds and upgraded the power supply for $20 and modded the power supply to a 6 pin and upgraded the riser card to a single x16 and got a quadro card for like $35, using MSI Afterburner to overclock the card and it works like a charm for the cheap :)

[@2GuysTek]

Those sound like interesting mods! Was it a standard ATX PSU? If so, how'd you get it to fit?

[@drkcodeman]

I actually used a server power supply they are way cheaper then desktop, main reason why i am using a server parts are so cheap. Here is the power supply mod i was talking about i.imgur.com/Dp7MHJO.jpg i.imgur.com/vqNmHx1.jpg Not the greatest solder job but it works. I have a Nvidia Quadro 4000 in it. Currently it does DHCP for the house and running a steam in home streaming server. My next big upgrade is going to be a PCIE extender cable so I can fit a full size gtx 1080 in it. Here is a screenshot of the servers resouces: i.imgur.com/pSEUbRU.png

[@peterbalogh2646]

Sounds good... until you check your electricity bill. I wonder how much would a more modern server cost with equal computing power, and how would the electricity bill look like.

[@zackmatulis4094]

Just picked one of these up from a junk yard today for 10 bucks. Hoping it runs! It's a lower end model with a single CPU, single Invidia GPU, 32 gigs of RAM and a Velociraptor HHD Absolutely massive machine, hope I can find matching CPUs and some 32GB sticks of RAM to get the full 512 gigs in there lmao

[@2GuysTek]

They’re great systems!

[@zackmatulis4094]

@@2GuysTek Can't wait to test it out, gotta find a Display Port to HDMI cable or something before I can hook it up and see if it actually functions but I'm super stoked. Current PC is an older eMachines case fitted with a nice Asus board, Asus graphics, Intel i3, Crucial RAM and twin Barracuda hard drives. I originally went to the junk yard looking for some upgrades and was lucky enough to find a few i5s and some bigger RAM sticks before I even stumbled upon this monster Dell Yep, it was a good day today lmao

[@2GuysTek]

Sounds like it!

[@McTroyd]

You're a braver man than I, entrusting that much to a random eBay seller. Last time I went for a cheap server, I went for a NewEgg open box deal. It wasn't as good a deal, but at least I had a usable return policy if it was borked... Good show!

[@2GuysTek]

Thanks for watching!

[@jeffreyplum5259]

This is better as a reference. Yes the price is misleading for many people. Many home Lab video people are pushing dell Rxxx solutions or Supermicro motherboards which cost even more. The T7600 will remain an Rxxx alternative as long as they are sold. I'd buy one myself, but I am making due with some low power Quad cores. The T7600 would be nice if I were going full power tower for my VMs. One secret I will be testing is a PCIE NVME adapter which supports and powers an M2 SATA SSD. The SATA SSD requires a SATA data cable to work. The card fits full or low profile cases. It can handle both a Boot NVME drive and a fast SATA SSD for VMs. I plan on using the HDDs in the system for data storage. The card will use the Video card slot in my systems doing VM / container duty. Their aging low power, low thread count processors will need all the help they can get. I believe others will ve able to strtech their old desktop systems as I am. Thanks and god protect and bless you all.

[@Florin76]

Guys, don't understand why you bother with proprietary ESXi instead of XCP-NG or unRAID?

[@2GuysTek]

The biggest reason is that working with ESXi as part of my #homelab keeps me sharp for working with VMware professionally in my day job. Thanks for watching! -R

[@juri14111996]

@@2GuysTek why not a seperate Storage only Server?

[@2GuysTek]

@@juri14111996 we technically have that already with our #Synology NAS. We use NFS datastore mounts from ESXi to volumes hosted on the NAS for VMs with big slow disks. Unfortunately the NAS only has a 4x1Gbit LACP trunk to the network so it's read/write rate isn't anywhere near what we can store on the internal NVMe.

[@randomweirdyoutubechannel8955]

I'm still proud of my new little rig 8gb of ram and a4 pro 7300b sandisk ultra 2 480gb ssd all for £30

[@Minitomate]

The potential of upgrading this machine is mind-blowing. Nevertheless you have to get all the other components at barely the cost of the computer, specially a video card if you want to virtualize multiple hosts from 1 machine. Even though still a very big barigain what you found. Thumbs up for that! And how you can fusionate 2 or more computers in one big to be able to do the same thing as one PC that is way powerful?

[@2GuysTek]

It's the magic of virtualization! There is just so much power in modern hardware these days that we just don't unlock running one OS on it at a time. A platform like the T7600 is a great place to play with virtualization and fully unlock all of that potential with multiple VMs at a time! Thanks so much for watching and the comment!

[@Argus10q]

$300 is still my dream

[@drcyb3r]

I just built myself a 2011-3 based System with DDR4 and 2 12 core Xeons. I used cheap used parts and it wasn't much more expencive then the pc built in the video.

[@2GuysTek]

That's awesome! It's amazing how much power you can get for your money these days! Thanks for watching!

[@babugowda1683]

Awesome presentation 😈

[@2GuysTek]

Thank you for watching! Consider subscribing!

[@babugowda1683]

@@2GuysTek done

[@markarca6360]

Instead of costly VMWare ESXi, why not opt to XCP-ng (formerly Citrix XenServer) or Proxmox VE??? Those are the other viable options aside from ESXi. The choice is up to you whatever hypervisor you want to install.

[@2GuysTek]

Those are great options as well! There are a few reasons I went with VMware, one being that working with it in my #homelab helps keep me sharp in my professional work life.

[@jakemann2102]

Dang I am loving this 4k60 video. I subscribed just because of it.

[@callmebigpapa]

I can run 8 VM's on my FX-8350 no problem (~800 processes) the bottle neck is the old boards only support 32gb of ram so this sounds like a great solution! Thanks for posting! Only downside to this is likely no Spectre or Meltdown patching available, but not a big deal since this is likely lan only.

[@sirs4878]

AMD Ryzen™ VR-Ready Premium

[@pkf4124]

I ve been using old tech servers for some time. Its great get something just out of manufacturers warranty but for change, instead of several grand. Plus you can upgrade for cheap too.

[@2GuysTek]

I had been doing this with servers for years too, but never seriously considered using workstations till now! This has been such a success that I probably will never go back to server hardware again. Thanks for watching!

[@pkf4124]

@@2GuysTek Ive ironically used servers as workstations.... Fujitsu servers, that I have used all happily run windows 8 and 10. found this out by accident when I booted up a spare drive in mine by accident. Hyper v works very well and the two SAS cards I got for free :) work well. even has a dual screen graphics card and sound. I work as an IT engineer so comming across"old" tech is a work hazard and one I often benefit from. seconhand is great.

[@rossbrigoli]

$300 does not give you a virtualization server. It's more like $300 + $2000 for Ram, nvme storage, hard drive.

[@sirs4878]

Perfect Answer Sir!

[@paulpoco22]

Cool. Looks like good upgrade for unRAID.

[@nandulalkrishna923]

You didn't show us the operation videos , is it quieter than the old one ?. Great project thi

[@alv1nxx]

I want to know that as well ! ... it's a shame you haven't got an answer

[@wakkadakkaify]

a modern ryzen with 8 cores will do just fine for VM host at home - at a much lower cost in terms of energy used and hardware needed. Not to mention faster storage available etc. Old machines are cool but if you are looking for bang for your buck theyre not worth it in the long run.

[@johnmadsen37]

Yeah. Any cpu can do virtualization. This guy is just a KZbin guy. Nothing more. His facial expressions are distracting. Like he is trying to look ‘sincere’ but really looks like he is ready to cry.

[@bogdahn689]

In therms of energy, i think you can use an old cheap server many years before reaching the amount of energy to produce a new server.

[@sirs4878]

How many VMs Ryzen 5950X can run?

[@wakkadakkaify]

@@sirs4878 odd question. It depends on what kind of vm, how CPU intensive etc etc there's 100 answers

[@brekkurz]

Shouldn't use RAID5 or RAID6 for SSD arrays due to excessive parity writing. SSD arrays are much better on RAID10. In general RAID5 is totally antiquated. RAID10 provides the same redundancy with higher speeds with lower wear on SSD's. As data stores get larger single parity cannot be considered reliable, requiring either RAID6 or alternate specialty fire system solutions (ZFS, BTRFS, Unraid, etc.) As an aside, RAID10 also benefits from the mirroring technique of redundancy. Rebuilding (copying) a mirror is much less demanding on a RAID than rebuilding with parity which places higher demands on multiple other drives increasing risk of additional drive failures.

[@2GuysTek]

These are great points! The only real downside to RAID10 is the disk cost. In my current config 6x500GB@RAID5 comes out to about 2.5TB, and at RAID10 is 1.5TB. Thanks for the comment!

[@grenvillephillips6998]

Nice editing, good content!

[@scottz45]

Thanks for the info. I used this as a guide to get my new(used) server off the ground but I went with Unraid. I love the docker approach when a VM is over kill.

[@2GuysTek]

That's great to hear! It's really important to us that people get something out of our work, thank you for letting us know the video helped!

[@FastRedPonyCar]

Bare minimum, buy another 700 series dell, put a PERC H700 card in to gain support for drives bigger than 2tb and load it with 6 of the biggest drives you can, setup Open media vault as a VM and create some big virtual drives for it in VM ware. Configure them in OMV as SMB shares and then setup a cheap desktop PC with an old quad core i7 and a basic low end gaming GPU (I use a 750ti) and install plex on that and map windows to the OMV file shares to be the home of your plex library. Use that new dell you got for all other stuff but plex needs it’s own dedicated box if you plan to transcode any 4K content. I learned the hard way.

[@Squash_Man]

I am not understanding how you got all eight 2.5" drives connected to one SAS connector. If the 3.5" disks are connected to the other SAS connector the cable you have only allows you to connect 4 of the 2.5" SATA drives to the other SAS connector.

[@stoned_mosquito]

Guys, this is awesome video, you put up some great info. Please keep up with videos, you deserve more subs. i've upvoted and subscribed, and im gonna tell my friends.

[@2GuysTek]

That’s awesome! This keeps us going!

[@amegabyte7986]

This thing looks power hungry...:o

[@2GuysTek]

It wasn't too bad, it averaged around 200-300 watts of power which is no more power hungry than an average desktop. Now, if we had thrown in a bunch of GPUs or mechanical hard disks, it would have consumed more.

[@JoergSi]

nice idea, the same machine has a price tag at German eBay of 1.300,- €, congratulations to the cheap buy!

[@2GuysTek]

That’s a serious bummer! Are the equivalent HP workstations any cheaper? I know that HP has a higher market penetration in Europe than Dell. Check those out and see if they’re more affordable! Thanks for watching!

[@McTroyd]

Specifically, the magic search term you want is "Proliant." It's a brand they got when they acquired Compaq. HP Enterprise still sells Proliant servers; used ones can be quite cheap.

[@JoergSi]

@@2GuysTek still don't know how you have done this, following your link to the US eBay the price tag for the dual Xeon is 1150 and more $, good fetch!

[@2GuysTek]

Joerg S the crazy thing is when I originally started searching for a system these prices were just average. Sure there were some high-priced ones, but a majority were in the $300-500 USD range. I look now and I can’t believe how much the average price is!

[@JoergSi]

@@2GuysTek It is as it is :-) I believe you that you had paid 300 $ for the system. Because of videos like yours the demand rises, and in parallel the price, this is called capitalism ;-) All the best from Germany. A really nice video that gave me the crazy idea to build something similar, but with one exception, I'm aiming for unraid. Why have you chosen ESXi?

[@zachray]

The first 2 vms you showed in the beginning, used for file share and storage, what were they? I also have R720 but we're using dropbox for convenience..

[@2GuysTek]

We have a Nexcloud instance that we use for transferring and syncing data between Jon and I. It looks, functions, and does everything Dropbox does - but has so many more features and apps to it! We even run a kanban board on it! It's completely free, fully functional, and regularly updated. If you have storage on your R720, and you have a good Internet connection give it a shot!

[@mdr721]

With great power come great electric bill

[@2GuysTek]

Baaazing!

[@h2oaddict28]

Sandy bridge will to that, he was just one step away from ivy bridge...

[@sherwinm]

Dual xeon at $300 is a deal. I checked your ebay link. They’re not those prices at the moment but I’m gonna keep my out. This is a good idea. Smaller footprint and quieter than the dell r700 series

[@juri14111996]

i just found 3 HP Proliant G6 with betwen 144 and 200GB Ram, each Server has dual CPU installed. just no drives. but its fine storage will be in a storage only Server.

[@sirs4878]

How many VMs Ryzen 5950X can run?

[@sherwinm]

@@sirs4878 i'm currently using ryzen 2600 (not X) running proxmox with 64GB ram. i have 5 VMs and 2 LXCs running. CPU resource wise, it's barely hitting 15% usage. though i'm not running anything "heavy". mainly pihole, VOIP server for home, proxy server, docker server. i'll run out of ram before i worry about cpu usage.

[@DavidHitchcockJr]

Great video!

[@MrNpkellogg]

You mean $300 new??? oh, now I see the comments, and this is making more sense. Nothing that big should cost that little.

[@drkcodeman]

love videos like this

[@ramhee98]

nice vid👌 i would have bought a dell r720 (i programmed a software to controll its fans so its not that loud) but hey thats also cool

[@alv1nxx]

how did you do it ? does your software work with ESXi ? ... I have a R720 too, but it's loud as hell, I can't use it at home at all

[@dupajasio4801]

Good idea in general. For fun and testing. For production costs are hidden in electricity to cool the thing etc. You made it look easy but I feel it's not...

[@SuburbanBBQ]

The T7600 is an excellent machine and extremely expandable. My single XEON example has been beefed up quite a bit with Ebay parts. The parts are absolutely dirt cheap.

[@Shane-Singleton]

If you're running a Plex or Emby VM you may want to install some kind of graphics card and use it as a passthrough for transcoding. This will take a ton of work off of your CPU's and let them take care of the day to day functions of the VM's themselves. Even cards that run on 75w PCIe power will get you a lot of benefit, there. No need to drop in a 2080ti (most server and workstations don't have power provisions for the PCI power that is needed for the bigger cards anyway unless specifically ordered like that) It's good that you were able to pick that thing up for $300. I've got a stack of Dell Poweredge servers under my desk. One of them is a R710 like you guys have. And they are very useful. Although without knowing the specs you're upgrading from in your R710 it's kind of hard to determine if the juice is worth the squeeze. As far as noise. They're in the garage so that's really a problem?

[@2GuysTek]

I was under the impression that hardware transcoding in plex on Linux was still broken, is that not the case anymore? I would be more than happy to passthrough a GPU if I knew that had been resolved.

[@Shane-Singleton]

@@2GuysTek Not sure about linux. The people that I know that are doing it are all using windows based installations. Some native, some using passthrough on a hyperviser.

[@ngenes1]

This is Rock Soup!

[@PlankensNetworkingTutorials]

I am considering buying one of these for myself. Thanks for the video! Can you make a video recording how the VM’s preform? Make run some bench marks on the VM’s I’d really appreciate it!

[@2GuysTek]

We released another video talking about the VMs that we run and what they're used for. We only lightly touch on the performance though: kzbin.info/www/bejne/n6TWpZVqbb6BfMk That being said, we'll add this to the list of ideas! There is a lot of interest in how well systems like this perform. Thanks for the comment!

[@Squash_Man]

So do all the T7600 have the usb connection on the motherboard to boot from?

[@rashadrivera100]

Is there any way to upgrade this Dell system to support ESXi 7 or 8? Also, my PC lacks the TMP module. Can someone advise on a way to install this module for this platform? Thanks a bunch.

[@realisticroot5576]

first time watched i liked nice choice i use dell optiplex 3010 i wanna build a new one one day i liked and subscribed nice work.

[@2GuysTek]

Thank you!

[@h2oaddict28]

I grabbed an r7 1700 with a b450 Mobo and 32gb of ram, sata cards are cheap and I have 2 m.2 slots on the board. Spent 300 euro for the combo. Might not be as affordable, but it's new, far less power hungry and it's upgradable, can just grab a 16 core and 128gb of ram i need to (b450 mortar).

[@sirs4878]

How many VMs Ryzen 5950X can run?

[@2GuysTek]

Quite a few!

[@asaitasai4585]

How many electricity power used this system? In a month if system not hard work?

[@2GuysTek]

Electrical rates are different in different parts of the world, so this is a tough question to answer. Where we are we're charged .11 cents a kW/hr. This system uses about the same amount of power as a high-powered desktop and as such we don't notice it's power consumption any more than our other desktops. Thanks for the question!

[@2GuysTek]

Here's a more concrete answer: At the current run rate, the system is using around 300-400W depending on its workload. The UPS reports that at the current run rate it's consuming around $1/day or $30/mo depending on the number of days in the month. Like I mentioned earlier, here where I live in the US 1kW/hr costs $.11.

[@herbertvaughn5738]

first-timer; liked very much. Wanted to know more about noise and power consumption? Been looking for a budget vm-server/everything else backup for home lab. Again thanks for the skooling.

[@2GuysTek]

When we tested power consumption it came in at ~400W of power. And because this is a workstation, it was designed to sit at a desk in and office, so it's quiet.

[@painztoyou]

Great Video! Can you tell me what song that is at the end?

[@RegentLemay_FullReg]

Where is the part 2....please i would like to these beast run ESXI.

[@2GuysTek]

That's a great idea! You're the first to ask, but we'd be happy to do a run through of it's life and workload running ESXi! Thanks for the suggestion!

[@Shkunk1]

Nice!

[@Eli0569]

for all that you did with this server, I think that you might of been better of using Unraid which would of given you better options with VMs, HD setup and expansion, and overall future expandability with an low overhead. I would have also move all the guts from that limiting Dell case to a more robust server case with the overall cost being just a little more. Just a suggestion...

[@2GuysTek]

Great recommendations! The decision to use ESXi is driven by a few factors, but one big one is that VMware is considered THE enterprise virtualization platform for business and running this helps me continue to sharpen my professional skills and experiment with #homelab stuff that directly benefits me in my day job as well. Thanks for the recommendations!

[@canjeero]

@@2GuysTek👍

[@larrikin6949]

Wow, great vid! Underrated channel.

[@2GuysTek]

Thanks for watching!

[@TippanisSAPTraining]

Hi , can we install ESXI 8 IN DELL T7190 ?

[@christopherbane7162]

I purchased a T7600 and it only has 1 sata power adapter. How did you add a sata power adapter to get 2 for the ssd hard drive box that went in the 5.25 bay?

[@2GuysTek]

There should be more SATA connectors available, if not, buy this: amzn.to/35WNAVv

[@alanamado8087]

Which removeable (6) drive bay did you use?

[@TheKeirsunishi]

Did you guys flash the raid controller? Have a similar setup with the sata to sas wire and i cant seem to get xfs working

[@raresmarin129]

Hi, I love the video it is very informative! I would love to know how much power it uses? I am thinking of building one where I would initially only use it as a NAS server although I am not sure what I should expect to pay for my electrical bill. I love that it is so scalable and I would be interested in running some VM's in the future. I would really appreciate if you could give me a rough estimation of energy consumption for running a NAS, thank you and keep up the grate videos!

[@2GuysTek]

This chassis has a 1300W PSU, but we never - even when fully loaded - came close to that consumption. We'd been asked quite a bit over time how much the system used while running and if memory serves it rarely crested 300W of usage. Of course, what you put into it will affect the consumption, so if you toss in a couple high-powered GPUs your mileage will vary. Best of luck and thanks for watching!

[@MrAtomUniverse]

if it isn't on the x16, the NVME wouldn't get the full bandwidth isn't it ? Do consider building a video for knowing how many disk a motherboard can support, what should we be looking at to know the limit of our mother boards.

[@2GuysTek]

Great question! And the short answer is no, NVMe M.2 interfaces are only 4x PCIe interfaces. So as long as you're providing at least a 4x PCIe interface you'll be able to take advantage of the maximum speed of the SSD. Thank you for the suggestion for a video! We *LOVE* getting ideas like this! We'll add it to our list!

[@MrAtomUniverse]

@@2GuysTek AHH ok , meaning x16 can support an adapter up to 4nvme , e.g Asus Hyper .

[@temp50]

@@MrAtomUniverse Or with a cheaper solution if the motherboard suports PCI-E Bifurcation (logically grouping lanes on a single physical connector ). In this case you can have a cheap "dumb" connector instead of having a card with a PCI-E switch on it.

[@Airbag888]

What's the power draw of this system.. feels like at least 230-300W

[@2GuysTek]

Great question! I'll connect up my kill-a-watt to it and give you the running consumption. The 1300W capability of the PSU is overkill for the standard workloads we throw at it with ESXi and no high-end GPU consuming power. Stay tuned! -R

[@Airbag888]

@@2GuysTek yay thank you

[@2GuysTek]

@@Airbag888 Okay, sorry for the delay. The system currently pulls around 400W on average, depending on how busy it is. Considering the PSU is rated for 1300W, I'm well below the maximum consumption of the system! One thing to add, my UPS estimates the total cost of running the system and week-to-week looks like it's estimated to cost me ~$7 and some change, or a bit over a dollar a day to run. Not bad!

[@Airbag888]

@@2GuysTek Thanks man! Appreciate the feedback. 400W is indeed well within the PSU's limits. I was curious as for my needs of a home server I'm looking for a much more frugal home server (20-30W idle and 70W load) that can still accomodate 64GB RAM or more. Cheers and keep up the good work!

[@achannelhasnoname5182]

@@2GuysTek In germany this would result in a total electricity cost of 3$ per day, making a grand per year. As you said, the Ryzen 3900X has even more performance and would cut the electricity cost in less than half. So depending on where you live, a new system might be the cheaper alternative.

[@BudgetGamerz]

Almost a year later but respect on your build. I like smart spending.

[@nathandouglas7821]

As many have said they bought the donor for $300 there was a ton of money wrapped up in hardware they already had. Also he keeps saying furture proof.. I find this hard to believe as you are already starting off with 10vms. The host needs at least 4 cores of your 32 which leaves 2-3 cores for all your vms if spread out evenly. That may work for you needs now (although i cannot understand how) but were is the future proofing headroom here?

[@matthewcaylor342]

Lols, I am watching this video on one of these computers. It is my work workstation.

[@2GuysTek]

Inception!

[@matthewcaylor342]

@@2GuysTekplease, your computer people, use the correct word, recursion. =P

[@NegroRotary]

just bought a Dell 2900 tower for $50, about to do the same

[@2GuysTek]

Awesome! Welcome to the club!

[@NegroRotary]

@@2GuysTek thank you, I’ll keep you posted

[@NegroRotary]

@@2GuysTek I actually bought a Precision T7910 it will have VMware

[@MajorArchitect-0]

late to the game, That was My pc in 2016 and I got it for a similar price too. I also got it for the same reason 😂 I Love virtualization

[@2GuysTek]

#homelab FTW! Are you using ESXi as your hypervisor or something else? Thanks for watching!

[@MajorArchitect-0]

never truly ran ESXI on it as the primary until I sold it to a friend. I used UnRaid for a while, until I decided I wanted a different set up. Then I switched to the X99 platform with a high core count Xeon so I could have 4 graphics cards. Pretty nice now, I have dedicated USB 3.0 controllers for all my VM’s 22GB RAM per vm (96GB total), each vm has its own SSD and as mentioned 4 capable GPU’s. better yet, in a case the size of a mid tower, with water cooling. I do miss my Dell precision though, a lot of good memories. would definitely still recommend it for someone who wants to get into virtualization 100%

[@burgundyhome7492]

So how's the noisy fan at the start of the video. Curious how'd you managed to tone it down?

[@2GuysTek]

It quiets down and is no louder than a normal workstation.

[@miscxinou]

I bought this exact model. For some reason, it becomes unresponsive, is still "on" but no I/O, no display or keyboard... I swapped all the RAM and for a couple of weeks it worked without any issue, now the issue happened again, now the issue happens even after an hour. The reason to swap the ram was a suggestion from a dell forum, which initially worked. If anyone has an Idea, could it be the PSU, it's a 1300W PSU, maybe it's a must that it has to be connected to a UPS or PDU? Or, could it be a damaged dimm slot in the mother board? Let me know any ideas, as I really need this machine to study.

[@2GuysTek]

When dealing with issues like this, start simple - if you suspect you have RAM issues, put a single stick in (per CPU), and boot the machine. Does it come up? Is it stable? Increase the RAM additions until you find the bad slot. To your question about the PSU, no you do not need a UPS - for the PSU to fully consume 1300W of power you'd have to have that system under a significant load with internal peripherals (like GPUs) that required that high of wattage. If you do get the system up and running also consider upgrading the BIOS to the last released version. best of luck!

[@ierosgr]

I have the same server bought a few months ago with some projects in mind....using Debian as hypenvisor failed since passthrough was not an option thinking that iommu and vt-x had issues (clearly they didnt) Even in Dell forums they couldnt answer a simple question if supports iommu or not. I ending up usig unraid and everything worked as intended, Dont forget to update the bios to A16 or something. iommu groups are split by default very nice with each component to each own iommu group. Until now I m very satisfied with performance Wattage accoustics !!!! A nice addition would be to have your cpu but instead I have the 2x6 core xeon set PS Be extra carefull when it comes to gpu. Many supported but the width would be a problem closing up that weird left panel. I ended up with an sff x570 to pass it through to a Win 10 vm

[@2GuysTek]

All great points! Thanks for the comment! You're right about that goofy door thing. Thankfully we're not running a GPU with that much height either.

[@retrogamer426]

Hi, great video by the way. I have the Dell Precision T3600, and its been over a year that its been running 24/7. How long do these refurbished servers last for?

[@allysonprincess]

Also Sandy Bridge is PCI 2.0. Also a 16 core ryzen is more then that old CPU, heck I tested my Ryzen 2700x vs a T7600 with 16 cores and the ryzen was still faster on multi core performance and single core.

[@PatrickChapmanuk]

Yeah I got an old ProLiant ML110 G7 server that I installed a Xeon chip on and 32GB ram maximum. It sings like a bird as a file server and quiet as a mouse. I'd love to stick 10GbE on it, but will have to wait. Nice server.

[@2GuysTek]

You running Linux? Windows? FreeNAS? Thanks for watching!

[@PatrickChapmanuk]

@@2GuysTek I'm running a domain server in WSE 2019.

[@yankeebisbis]

Does your wife or partner knows about this server? because a woman who is concerned about power bill will not tolerate such a power hungry beast in the house.

[@pharohbender]

and what's the power from the wall? would be nice to know

[@WoodUCreate]

Since you have the nas server, why not use iSCSI and access your vms stored there? Then all you need is a simple cheap pair of local drives to boot esxi in raid 1. Less complicated on the server, less heat, less power, likely less cost since you should already have some massive disks on the nas.

[@2GuysTek]

We actually do for a few VMs that require very large disks! However, we switched from iSCSI to NFS mounts in ESXi because the iSCSI performance of the model of Synology we use was worse than NFS. Also, NFS allows for the ability to look into those volume from outside of ESXi which is helpful if we need to tail logs.

[@temp50]

@@2GuysTek NFS is also recommended by VMware and the preferred over iSCSI.