Dell Poweredge 2650

Saldash

Saldash

Saldash

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Joined
26 Mar 2013
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2
Location
Chester, England
Hi guys,

So I was wondering a tech fair a couple of days ago and found a PE2650 which I haggled down to £50 for.
It's just been sitting here next to me since then, now I want to start tinkering with this thing but I'm not even sure where to start.

Its got a bunch of 73gb disks installed, a raid key and 128mb of raid memory, looks pretty clean and I'm told boots to bios without issue.
I've not power tested it yet, and was looking for some advice on what to look for, in terms of internals etc, and also on where to start getting raid properly setup and Windows Server 2008 R2 installed and running.

Any advice?

For the interested;
312h3xv.jpg
 
  • It'll be loud.
  • It'll use a lot of electricity.
  • The processing power will be very limited.
  • The expansion options are limited, and out-of-date.
If it's just something to play with then fair enough, but for any practical purpose it isn't a very good starting point.
 
bremen1874 said:
  • It'll be loud.
  • It'll use a lot of electricity.
  • The processing power will be very limited.
  • The expansion options are limited, and out-of-date.
If it's just something to play with then fair enough, but for any practical purpose it isn't a very good starting point.
Click to expand...

It was bought on a whim to tinker with and learn so no serious intention.
It would be nice if I could get it setup properly, if even for a shot time

--

According to the side sticker, it's a model SMP01 ?
 
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I'd guess that Server 2008 R2 should have enough drivers to install without any particular difficulty. You'll just need to configure the RAID first.

The other option is to download Dell's system build utility and let that handle the RAID configuration and driver selection (assuming there's a version that supports the PE2650 and 2008 R2).

The first thing you want to is get it booted into the BIOS and see what the hardware actually is (CPU(s), memory, HDD type (10K/15K), etc.).
 
What xeon does it have in it? Having a quick look at others it seems that they are so old gen that they don't support 64-bit which would rule out 2008 R2 iirc
 
2650 was end of life probably 3-4 years ago, so I'd guess its around 9-10years old.. you can put the service tag into the dell site and see the shipping date. not much you can really do with it, its 320 scsi, ddr1 etc..
 
These are quite out of date servers, I would forget 64-bit for a start as it wont support it.

You could get away with Server 2003 or Server 2008 (not R2) 32-bit, or if you want to have a go at virtualising to see what it can handle, you should be ok with something like ESXi v3.0, however you wont be able to use v4 or v5 as this requires 64-bit.
 
I still see a fair amount on 2950s in data centres I visit, so you would assume they are in production environments.

Edit: it's a 2650 not a 2950 so ignore
 
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