Dell R310 vs R410: Which one to keep?

BlizzardX

BlizzardX

BlizzardX

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Auckland, New Zealand
Hello

So I've got my hands on two identical Dell R310s with iDRAC 6.0 Enterprise's each and 2.93ghz xeon cpus. I intend to keep one for my domain controller plus other stuff, however I'm tempted to keep the other one and sell the R410 as it might get more value than the R310s.

The R410 is a dual CPU LGA1366, with 4 dimm sockets per cpu, but only 1 pcie expansion slot. Being a 1u server is has very high density and decent power usage given its the early core i7 gen so still has value.

The R310 can carry up to 48 GB Ram per unit and given this is a home lab, I'm struggling to see how I will exceed the current 26GB Ram in the two vmhosts I already have!

The advantage of the R310 is quieter, has two pcie slots. The R410 has more cpu sockets, greater range of cpus, more memory capacity...

I'm leaning towards the R310 given I'm not going to use more than 48GB of RAM in a single host, it has more pci-e slots so can carry an additional network card if necessary...

What would you do for a home lab? R410 or R310?

Chris
 
In comparison to what? At the moment, the R310 is idling at just over 60w running windows server and dishing out sky HD to various clients around the house... take in to account this is a homelab and the location is remote to the main house, I need IMPI and I can't afford any of the sandybridge / ivy bridge class xeons yet!
 
If it's in a part of the house where noise/heat aren't an issue, then great. But 60W 24x7 is still £60-£70 per year to run.

I'm not familiar with the R310 specifically, but I must admit I'm pretty surprised to hear 60W idle. My Gen9 (latest) blades, with 2 x E5-2690 and 384GB RAM average 100W at idle, and that's with shared power and cooling (both come from the blade enclosure), which in theory is a lot more efficient.
 
Yes, noise isn't an issue and neither will be heat, full access to fresh air and full ventilation. To be honest, I had it running in a cupboard (with no fresh air) with my two 4u cases containing a dual cpu 1366 supermicro setup and a xpenology build and only the slight whine of the fans was audable through the door.

Over the past day it has averaged a power draw of around 68w, which was about what my slightly newer i5 2400 was using but not as useful (and didn't have remote access)... I have a complex home setup which is effectively centralising all the house computers in to one place and then using hdmi extenders and usb over ip to distribute to the rooms, with VMs and decent motherboards with pci-e x8 slots I can get enough cheap gpus to run media pcs to each room, and my gaming pc is also housed there and I just use steam streaming to access the games on it.

All in all, my setup uses around 250w for the main servers and then the gaming one is dependent on how much I actually play games as the gpu obviously draws the most.
 
Wow sounds amazingly complex in a geeky way. To answer your original question, I would go for the one with the lowest power consumption.
 
Unfortunately, Sky UK had last time I looked blocked the ability for HD channels to be decoded via the method I use as they had paired the cards with the decoders, however I believe that SD still works fine. In New Zealand, however access to HD is still avaiable as the system hasn't been abused by card sharers unlike Europe!

To make this work, you need some DVB-S2 PCIe tuner cards, a smart card reader (Omnikey 3121 works for me), OScam running in a Linux VM (I use an rPI) that can see the card reader, MDApi or other softcam decoder and finally your tv software of choice. The TV engines effectively use an intermediate layer (MDapi or others) to read the decoded smart card, with OSCam acting as the card server and hub for all your connections to the Sky card.

MY personal setup is the Dell R310 with 2 TBS 6981 dual DVB-S2 tuner cards, OScam running on my Pi model B, Windows Server 2012 R2 (with BDA filters installed), MDApi and Mediaportal TVServer.

The MP TVserver uses MDapi to connect to OScam to read the Sky card plugged in to the Omnikey, which then passes the keys through MDapi to allow TVserver to then decrpyt the stream in software. This uses some CPU for HD channels and much less for SD. Doing it in this way, allows me to connect any windows device that has access to MediaPortal to access TV from a central lcoation including the guide, tuners and recorded programs.

I use MP because of the custom sky software allowing full guide grab and channel updates on the fly and the ability to act as a central place for TV. MY system allows for up to 4 clients to be streaming TV at once from the Server in full HD from Sky, or to record up to 4 channels at once, or any combination of the above.
 
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