Possible Dell PE2950 harpertown server as DC

BlizzardX · 5 May 2015 at 21:48

Hi

I've got the possibility of getting my hands on an older Poweredge 2950. It's got 4GB ram, it has a single E5405 and dual power supplies. I'm tempted to run this as my domain controller and satellite card receiver with two SATA drives running from the board, not using the Perc that is installed. My current DC is a FX6100 on a consumer board drawing 77w at idle so having a full IPMI compliant system to access remotly would be great but I am concerned about the power usage.

I've seen the dell calculator that suggested a power draw of 160w at idle, but I wondered if that would be lower? I know that harpertown is particualry hungry and this chip doesn't have demand based switching so I wondered whether replacing it with one of the newer 50w chips with DBS would bring the consumption somewhere in line with the fx6100...

Any thoughts?

Chris

BlizzardX · 9 May 2015 at 10:40

Anyone got any views on this? I might take a punt on it at the moment as its cheap and I could probably strip it down and sell parts off individually.

I'd love to find another cheap 1366 dell but I think I NZ isn't so cheap for used servers and shipping one from the UK/US would be very expensive!

Caged · 9 May 2015 at 14:15

PowerEdge 2950 are loud, hot, and ancient. The RAM will cost you a comparative fortune if you wanted to upgrade it as well. Don't buy an 8 year old server and then spend money upgrading it either, that's completely pointless.

Why is remote access so important for you? If it's a must-have then see how far you can get with a desktop-class machine with vPro. Your ears will thank you.

BlizzardX · 9 May 2015 at 22:27

Hi Caged, Yup that they are, the only reason I'm looking at it is the price (currently sub 30 quid). I've got a Dell R410 and HP 8200SFF as my esxi hosts. Unfortunately the HP doesn't expose my DVB-s2 cards correctly and thus won't work for my 'IPTV' system around the house and the R410 has only one slot. Ideally, I'd like to get them on those two but having a separate DC running the cards (its at home so isn't an issue having this on a DC) would be ok as then my domain would be outside of the VSphere system.

So, back to the 2950. Replacing the CPU with a the low 40w one would be fine and is cheap and running the DC as it is would only require the 4GB installed in the system. I know when running Vsphere hypervisor it pulls around 300w hence why I am curious as a bare metal install running Server 2012 R2 essentials how much power it would pull.

With respect to the remote management and noise, the entire rack is housed under the house in an acoustic lined rack so the need to access remotely is needed. My current DC is an FX6100 pulling almost 100w at idle with the two DVBS cards and GPU but isn't rack mountable in the current case and does not have any out of band management abilities. This is why I am curious to the power draw at idle running a bare metal install of Server 2012 R2... The dell power calculator suggests 160w but I'm after real life examples ideally.

Sorry for the long reply but thank you!

Chris

Caged · 10 May 2015 at 00:11

Hmm. When you say it doesn't expose your DVB-S2 cards correctly I'm assuming you need VT-d, which as far as I know the 2950 doesn't support.

Edit: I can't read. I just assume everyone is using everything as a virtualization host these days. If you're running it on the bare metal then you'll be fine.