Picking Up Cheap Servers for Home Use

BillHicksRIP · 9 Feb 2011 at 20:59

Does anyone have any experience of picking up ex-corporate equipment for home use? There's tons of Xeon and Opteron-based servers going for buttons on auction sites and am wondering whether it's worth a punt on one for home use. I've built previous ESXi rigs on regular PC kit but some of these servers are dual-Xeons going for practically nothing. Any stories to share?

3dcandy · 9 Feb 2011 at 21:02

Got a Dell Poweredge 1850 last week. 1x 2.8ghz DP cpu, 2 gig ram, 1x 73 gig SCSI hard drive etc. etc. It's pretty good, but very loud. I already knew it was gonna be loud so had a plan in place, but you can't have it anywhere people need quiet at all...other than that, Ubuntu server one and running fine! Beware that the older cpu's have limited power managent and fans that run 24/7 so your electricity bill will rocket up...

bremen1874 · 9 Feb 2011 at 22:57

There’s a reason they sell for practically nothing…

They tend to be loud. Tower and 4/5U rack mounts are much easier to quieten when compared to 1/2U rack mounts.
They do tend to pull a lot of power, probably easily enough to be noticeable on a quarterly electricity bill if left on for extended periods.
They often aren’t that powerful when compared to even a middle of the range modern desktop.
Most will need ECC memory and SCSI drives.

ThorpedoUK · 10 Feb 2011 at 00:36

^^^ is correct

Its very tempting (and I did it, a DL380 G4 which I sold because I couldn't turn it on for too long or the ££££'s started rolling)

If you want my advice for what its worth buy the kit from here and build your own custom rig, it will be faster and save you a fortune on electricity bills, hearing aids.

You could build a six core system for less than £400 which would be ideal

m_cozzy · 10 Feb 2011 at 09:06

Agree. I went through a silly phase of filling my home up with ex -corp equipment, routers, firewall, servers etc. It cost a fortune in electricity & needed a room of its own.
I eventually saw sense & build a q6600 with 8gb of ram that ran esxi & virtualised all the old rubbish. Sat silently in the corner & my bills halved.

3dcandy · 10 Feb 2011 at 09:27

All valid points...but a £30 server V £400 new build is a bit moot because over a year they will come to roughly the same after electricity etc. As I said, I got my server for £30, even if it costs £400 a year in electricity all the hardware is rock solid and certain server features are just missing from desktop equipment. I'd agree that a 4-u or 5-u is easier to cool, but then again harder to find somewhere to stick it. Pro's and con's, and I personally enjoy the hardware RAID/SCSI and extra features just to learn about this stuff. I may replace it with a hexa-core AMD build later, but now I'm just enjoying it...

BillHicksRIP · 10 Feb 2011 at 09:29

Yeah, I'm resigned to continue building my own but am fed up trying to put together a home system with more than 16GB. I've spent weeks trying to find the right combination of kit which will tick all the boxes for a beefy server which will last a good while as well.

Needs to be able to run 24GB
A tri-channel X58 mobo with all 24GB loaded can only run the memory at 1066 or 800. I need to find out if it's possible/worth it to underclock 1333MHz DDR3 down to 1066

Needs to support VT-d as well as VT-x
Trying to find out for absolute certain if the mobo and CPU must both support VT-d has been a challenge. The Socket 1366 i7-9xxx CPUs that would go into the x58 boards do not support VT-d if you check on Intel's site. Other sources have said only the mobo needs to support it.

Need a hardware RAID 10 card which will run under ESX 4.1
Another bloody nightmare. The Whitebox HCL are all out of date and need revising for ESXi 4.1

Need at least 2 GBe cards.
The only bit I've got sorted!

I can't hang on till the end of the year for the purported quad-channel DDR3 SB chipsets to arrive but am bashing my head against the wall currently. I can pick up an IBM X3655 with dual Opterons and 32GB for £200 which is the reason for this post. :-)

3dcandy · 10 Feb 2011 at 09:39

Well the Opterons are much better powerwise than Xeons, as long as PowerNow! is enabled and sorted correctly. Still likely to be fairly noisy and power hungry, but for your needs it will be fantastic for the price. 2 x 2.6ghz cpu's should churn through the work. I'd probably go for the IBM in your position, if you can find somewhere to hide it away so the noise becomes less of an issue...

a1ex2001 · 10 Feb 2011 at 09:45

BillHicksRIP said:
Yeah, I'm resigned to continue building my own but am fed up trying to put together a home system with more than 16GB. I've spent weeks trying to find the right combination of kit which will tick all the boxes for a beefy server which will last a good while as well.

Needs to be able to run 24GB
A tri-channel X58 mobo with all 24GB loaded can only run the memory at 1066 or 800. I need to find out if it's possible/worth it to underclock 1333MHz DDR3 down to 1066

Needs to support VT-d as well as VT-x
Trying to find out for absolute certain if the mobo and CPU must both support VT-d has been a challenge. The Socket 1366 i7-9xxx CPUs that would go into the x58 boards do not support VT-d if you check on Intel's site. Other sources have said only the mobo needs to support it.

Need a hardware RAID 10 card which will run under ESX 4.1
Another bloody nightmare. The Whitebox HCL are all out of date and need revising for ESXi 4.1

Need at least 2 GBe cards.
The only bit I've got sorted!

I can't hang on till the end of the year for the purported quad-channel DDR3 SB chipsets to arrive but am bashing my head against the wall currently. I can pick up an IBM X3655 with dual Opterons and 32GB for £200 which is the reason for this post.

You have a very specific set of requirments which as you rightly point out are much easier to satisfy in the dedicated server market mainly because very few of those features are of a concern to desktop users. Fo your needs a second hand server may well be worth the cost in terms of electricity and noise as it will give you what you need for what I can only assume is a specialist use, most people don't need anything like this for home use so will find cost effective solutions using sandard desktop components or small cheap boxes like the HP Microserver.

jaybee · 10 Feb 2011 at 10:28

A few reasons they sell for peanuts:

Buiness Use

Businesses typically have no use for them since they are only interested in equipment that is in warranty/supported. Even if it were free, they need things to be guaranteed to be working including fix/repair/swap. Some small businesses that are fairly tech savy and have the time and expertise to support them may benefit from buying them cheap, but these are few and far between.

Home Use

As said above, your average Joe has to contend with added elec cost, heat, noise, space issues.

ajf · 10 Feb 2011 at 20:09

The main problem I have found with the older Xeon servers around is the lack of vt-x so no way of running 64bit OS on vmware, which rules out Server 2008, Exchange 2010 etc.

I think some Opterons unofficially work though? There is another post on here about cheap Opteron servers. Certainly a better bet anyway.

Andrew
P.S What is vt-d?

3dcandy · 10 Feb 2011 at 20:41

Aye, I'd go for a cheap Opteron if it was the right price. Can't complain with a dual core single cpu proper server hardware for £30 like I did. Picked it up too, so no postage. Can upgrade to another Xeon dual core (£5) + heatsink (£8). Memory is fairly cheap even if it is ECC. RAID key + battery backup plus 256mb read/write cache to improve disk performance is £20. At that price, to start you off (it will run a 64-bit server OS fine, just not hardware VT) it's a no-brainer in my view.

ThorpedoUK · 12 Feb 2011 at 01:30

3dcandy said:
All valid points...but a £30 server V £400 new build is a bit moot because over a year they will come to roughly the same after electricity etc. As I said, I got my server for £30, even if it costs £400 a year in electricity all the hardware is rock solid and certain server features are just missing from desktop equipment. I'd agree that a 4-u or 5-u is easier to cool, but then again harder to find somewhere to stick it. Pro's and con's, and I personally enjoy the hardware RAID/SCSI and extra features just to learn about this stuff. I may replace it with a hexa-core AMD build later, but now I'm just enjoying it...

So you think an equivalent Intel-VT Xeon system will come to the same as a £400 6 core AMD build over a year?

I think you are vastly mistaken .... if you compare like for almost like, £30?? I have not seen many "worthwhile" labs powered by a £30 ex-corporate pizza box.

Forget about the ex-corporate Xeons and just build a simple tower with desktop processors, dual core etc

There is no real reason to buy anything else for home / lab use.

3dcandy · 12 Feb 2011 at 08:54

ThorpedoUK said:
So you think an equivalent Intel-VT Xeon system will come to the same as a £400 6 core AMD build over a year?

I think you are vastly mistaken .... if you compare like for almost like, £30?? I have not seen many "worthwhile" labs powered by a £30 ex-corporate pizza box.

Forget about the ex-corporate Xeons and just build a simple tower with desktop processors, dual core etc

There is no real reason to buy anything else for home / lab use.

Nope, that's not what I said....IF you pick up an ex-corporate server for £30, even though it's more power hungry you'll save from paying out £400 from your cash in one hit and then pay back more on the electricity. If you check out the prices of rack mount cases for example, they are at least £40 for basic no name ones. My £30 server has gone in a home made rack with my £10 10/100 24-port switch and a £25 monitor and is in the cupboard under the stairs. Can't hear it, it integrates great with my network, the drivers are less flaky than the newer stuff and I'm happy. I made my choice because I'd love a new hexa-core system, but just haven't the cash to splash at this moment in time. I've enjoyed the messing, the SCSI set up, the taking it apart and cleaning it up...everything, same as I'd enjoy the unwrapping of new parts, building it up etc. You do pay your money and you do take your choice. Based on a years use however, I bet my system is as cheap if not cheaper as I'm very energy conscience on a whole, this uses the most electricity out of everything we own on a daily basis!

Perhaps I didn't make it clear, but that's what I was getting at. Not everyone can rack mount an old server that sounds like it should just be departing Heathrow but I can! If that was an issue, I'd stop the beer money for a bit, and build a system.