Dell PowerEdge R720xd Unboxing & Overview

[@Ronnocbot]

Nice! I currently use an R720 and R620 as a proxmox cluster in my home lab. I was able to purchase them from my employer for $100 a piece back in 2018. Still going strong, both with 256 go ram. Interesting to see yours.

[@beamnetworks1]

Good deal you got. I’m sure it’s a nice setup too. Thanks for the support.

[@TristanKazumiK]

What do you mainly use your PowerEdge server for? I also live in the NY/NJ area, and I will definitely keep the website in mind when ordering a second server. I also have a few more questions: - what distro of linux are you using? - how much power/cost does the server run you per month? - do you host websites? Web servers? or just NASs? I myself am trying to get more knowledgable about PowerEdges and server architecture/knowhow, and I even got my own R720 2.5 inch model from EBAY. I've got decent specs for starting out, but I want to start some kind of project, such as hosting a personal website or hosting a Minecraft server. But I'm so nervous about power costs or breaking something, that I've never started my server up out of fear! Which is such a waste! If you've got the time to answer my curiosity, I would greatly appreciate it. Thanks for showing the video! It looks super cool!

[@beamnetworks1]

Hello! Happy to hear you're interested in servers. It's been a lot of fun for me to learn over the past few years. - I'm using Ubuntu 22.04 LTS on all of my servers - My r720XD with 8 1TB SSD's has used 584kWh since April 12th this year, so over about 5 months, that would've costed ~$16/mo in theory, but I don't believe it actually has costed that much since our power bill never noticeably went up between March and April when I got the server. - I host all of them! I have about 35ish VM's at any given time that runs anything from my ~18 websites, Gitlab servers, photo storage, network shares, password management, minecraft servers, monitoring VM's like Grafana, etc. I'd say starting a website is a great first project, it was for me. Even without port forwarding, you can make a site and host it yourself on your own server really easily these days. I currently have 5 NGINX VM's running my sites that are all setup in High Availability so I can shut down or do maintenance on any VM and not have my sites go offline. That's the nice thing too, you can start out with a single VM running your site and scale it however big you want it to be. Same for "bare metal" servers. I started with 1 server and am up to 7 bare metal servers between a few different sites that all backup to each other and run VM's together. On the topic of breaking something, I can almost guarantee there's nothing you can break if you're running a pre built server. Worst case if you mess up your operating system, reinstall it. Not much to lose!

[@matrix-path-of-neo]

hi what is the name of that floor rack you got for the servers looks pretty nice and tidy , thank you!

[@beamnetworks1]

a.co/d/gr979ij

[@drdaaa7]

Would you mind? I've seen a lot of KZbinrs building home labs with massive setups at their homes. I know some use them for storing their data, media, cloud services, security cameras, and more. But I don’t think that’s the only reason they build these machines. I believe they might also use them for business. I’m trying to figure out what kind of business they could be running. Could you help me understand what businesses can be done with a home lab and if it's worth it?

[@beamnetworks1]

I’ll eventually turn this into a video because a lot of people have asked something along these lines. For me, my home lab / datacenter rack is a way for me to experiment and learn new things. Everything is self taught and I’ve learned a lot of useful knowledge from this. On a business level, this same technology can be used to host services like Snipe-IT (Inventory mgmt), Kimai (Time tracking/invoicing), WireGuard (Secure VPNs), UniFi UISP (CRM for Internet providers), Immich (Photo storage), etc. to save money on online subscription fees. Even something as simple as website hosting can be done on a server or raspberry pi to save tons on hosting fees. Hope this helps.