bunch of home network/server/infrastructure changes

[redhat]

Finally decommissioned my (getting pretty ancient) Dell PowerEdge T320. An Ivy-Bridge Xeon E5-2470 v2, 96GB of DDR3 ECC, 2x256GB M.2 SATA SSDs in RAID 1 on the on-board PERC S110 and 16x1.2TB 10K SAS drives in RAID 10 on the PERC H710 with about 6.5ish TB usable. Served me well for many many years, latest iteration was Server 2025 and Hyper-V running about 6 VMs. 2x DCs, 1 File server, 1 Debian VM for Docker containers and a 1 Backup server (Veeam B&R) to a QNAP TS-431+ NAS.

Picked up an HP DL360 G9 from a friend for cheap, 1/4 of eBay re-sale cheap. It had 16x16GB of DDR4 ECC DIMMS (all mix-matched), and 2x Xeon E5-2630v4 and some miscellaneous 120GB Intel SSDs and some WD VelicoRaptors.

My goal was as power efficient as this server can be, as I still wanted to run the same workloads.

So I pieced together some parts and I outfitted it as follows:
8x32GB DDR4 2133 Micron DIMMs, actually HPE SmartMemory which is nice to have, also less DIMMs = less watts to run
2x Xeon E5-2630Lv4 (procs run at 55w TDP)
added HPE TPM 2.0
Added the front 2x2.5" Cage to the onboard SATA controller
2x480GB Micron 2.5" SATA SSDs (onboard) - RAID 1 array
8x1.92TB Samsung 2.5" SATA SSDs (SmartArray controller) - 7 in RAID 6, 1 spare

Loaded with Server 2025. BIOS and all component firmwares updated to the latest. All Windows VMs are 2025 as well. What a little screamer this unit is! Peppy, and quiet. The T320 was such a loud tank... with drives failing every other month. Best part is, with all workloads running, idle wattage used is around 115-120watt. Where as the T320 pulled 175-200watt on a good day... usually much more.

My new RAID 6 1.92TB SSD array nets me about 8.5TB of space. I was previously using, all VMs, 6.5TB and running out! On my main Server 2025 OS (the Hyper-V host), I turned on Disk deduplication. That has ran, and runs periodically and has re-claimed about 1.5-2.0TB of space! Awesome. This volume is formatted as ReFS. Also went through and removed a whole bunch of un-needed stale files on the File server and saved about 1.3TB there. Should be plenty of space for the foreseeable future.

All SSDs bought were used on eBay. They're all Mixed Use, Digitally signed HPE drives, so they play very nice with ILO, the SmartArray controller and report all metrics. I am very pleased with the health of them, and physically they weren't beat. The lowest drive life of 98.7% estimates 107,583 days of life left based upon its workload to date. That is 294 years. Of course how accurate is that, but they're perfectly healthy to me.

The DL360 has 8x1GbE NICs offered to the OS and 1xGbE NIC for ILO. I have all 8 connected and configured as a SET (switch embedded team) with both the Server network and SAN network (really to just the NAS) trunked on them ports. Nice thing with SET is it'll balance VMs across the NICs and of course failover if one drops... not that I see one doing that, but it has it.

happy little DL360G9

massive old 5u Dell (so heavy)

Earlier over summer (I may have mentioned this), but moved the network closet/main rack to the closet of our new office room as we switched bedrooms around. Wanted the cable modem in here, but adding 75ft of RG6 added too much attenuation. So I compromised and ran 4 strands of armored SMF OS2 fiber from my basement "demarc" to the Office closet. Only two strands presently in use. It goes: Spectrum RG6-> SB8200 Cable modem -> TP-Link 1GbE Fiber Media Converter -> eth5 as WAN In on a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X SFP. I have Gigabit service 940Mbps x 35Mbps and that ancient ER-X still can handle it!

Beyond that, I replaced 4 plain (way too long) strands of SMF with armored and have a single armored cable with 6 fan out strands, again OS2 SMF going from this closet to the attic for the 2x Aruba 8-ports up there. Both 1930, one POE, one Non-POE.

patch panel in office closet

I fully expect this DL360 to happily run for many years. Soon I should pickup a spare SSD to keep on hand. Very pleased with how everything turned out.

 

[tburke]

That HP is still a fantastic box -- my colo'd lab machine is pretty similar (same RAM and storage, even!)... just with dual E5-2697v4's, I am running ESXi instead of Hyper-V, and have 2x10G uplinks going to it, because you can never have enough bandwidth. Even with the obnoxious CPUs, my kill-a-watt reading on it was around 250W during normal operation.

 

[redhat]

That HP is still a fantastic box -- my colo'd lab machine is pretty similar (same RAM and storage, even!)... just with dual E5-2697v4's, I am running ESXi instead of Hyper-V, and have 2x10G uplinks going to it, because you can never have enough bandwidth. Even with the obnoxious CPUs, my kill-a-watt reading on it was around 250W during normal operation.

That's awesome and really not horrible power usage wise. Do you really have the same SSDs? That is funny! If HPE made a 256GB I probably would have bought them for OS, but I'm not going to complain, a 500GB OS volume is always nice to have.

The HP flies though the BIOS so fast, whereas that T320 has to inventory the lifecycle controller every boot. It is just a cumbersome relic of an older time. Fortunately it has UEFI.

The more I think about my migration off of the T320, the more I realize how much that thing was living on borrowed time. Those 2.5" 10K SAS drives are every bit of 10-11-years... from 2014. Which reminds me, my QNAP NAS has 4 x 3TB WD Red from 2014! And they have no sense of quit in them it seems. I do have new-in-box newer CMR WD Reds ready for the eventual. But with over 10 years of power-on time, WOW.

 

[Pew]

I just retired the DL380 gen9s at work for some Dell 660xs. They're still kicking exceptionally well after 9 years and had to retire them for out-of-warranty reasons. Only issues we've had was with one raid controller (yay for four hour warranty!)

I just wish they were 3.5"!

 

[OVERKILL]

That's awesome and really not horrible power usage wise. Do you really have the same SSDs? That is funny! If HPE made a 256GB I probably would have bought them for OS, but I'm not going to complain, a 500GB OS volume is always nice to have.

The HP flies though the BIOS so fast, whereas that T320 has to inventory the lifecycle controller every boot. It is just a cumbersome relic of an older time. Fortunately it has UEFI.

The more I think about my migration off of the T320, the more I realize how much that thing was living on borrowed time. Those 2.5" 10K SAS drives are every bit of 10-11-years... from 2014. Which reminds me, my QNAP NAS has 4 x 3TB WD Red from 2014! And they have no sense of quit in them it seems. I do have new-in-box newer CMR WD Reds ready for the eventual. But with over 10 years of power-on time, WOW.

I'm currently in the process of replacing a DL380 G7 and G8 with a pair of DL380 G11's (PACS servers). I have a few G10's, and while they are faster to inventory than the G7 and G8, I find they still take a minute.

 

[Rob_Roy]

Nice setup. I am preparing to do something similar and setup a server rack in the basement and consolidate my equipment with more of a focus on cable management, and the addition of a UPS.

Do you have any use for another 1930 Aruba switch? I have an 8 port POE model that I plan to list soon.