REAL servers

ITT we talking about the real servers. Not the toy with 4 SATA drives connected via an AliExpress PCI-E to sata card. The actual soykaf the current civilization runs in. Why should I use this? >cheaper >better specs for less price >some models have 12 3.5'' SAS drives and cost less than a soykaf "NAS" with 2 bays >Xeon processors >ECC memory (useful for ZFS!) >Hell, you can put 3TBs of RAM >These servers are made to last until the heat death of the universe. No programmed obsolescence. >SAS drives are also designed to last until the heat death of the universe. So your data is relatively safe >As this thing is the most powerful machine you'll see in much time, you can run whatever you want on this and the thing won't complain. Currently I run Jellyfin, a VPS hosting service, grafana, a wiki, a mirror of my website, and it never goes to more than 20% CPU! Cannot be this good! You're right. This thing is like kicking dead whales down the beach more power than a Ferrari. But it is worth it. With some optimization and using LRDIMM RAM you can make it have 70W in idle. I have a proliant g9 with 172GB of RAM with a Xeon E5-2680v4 and it goes to 120W in idle (which is pretty good) It is also pretty big, and your mother/wife (if any) may complain about it. Let me tell you that if you married someone that does not respect rack servers you married the wrong woman. Do i *really* need a rack server to watch my animu? To ask that is the same to ask "Am I afraid of success"?(USER WAS WARNED FOR THIS POST, You should always elaborate on your opinions rather than just spilling the soykaf. What real servers have you run ? Why do you want to discuss real servers ? We don't kow you didn't elaborate.)

>>85540 I wish electricity was cheaper in my soykafhole. I run a 5700G server at 20 watts. Any recommendations for a better option?

>>85540 I ran a couple R720s for a few years, but yeah the electricity cost is too insane to justify for me at least. If you use it to make money somehow then that would make sense. Now I'm currently running two Optiplex 5070 minis I picked up from work. 12-15w each and run 35 containers each no problem. Though, thinking on it now, your point about SAS is true and it may end up costing me more over time in terms of hard drives.. that's some math for a later time.

Any tips to getting a server for cheap? I've looked at second hand sites, but I only see listings for ancient stuff (32bit) or consumer stuff.

>>85544 If you remove one processor instead of running it with 2 you'll get better power consumption It's good that I have some guys paying me to use servers on my machine. the electricity cost kind of pays itself as I life in the soykafhole of Europe (long live the mediterranean) i don't have many issues with electrity costs. It's about 10 euros @ 120W for a month >>85546 Look for "proliant g9" in Ebay. you can have a really powerful proliant g9 for less than 200 euros. Promise If you're in US fuarrrk urself lol

>>85546 What are you planning on running?

>>85540 Great thread. I'm in the market for a server for torrenting, Jellyfin and Moonlight/Sunshine. That's a proliant DL380, right? Thoughts on the ML30 (the tower one)?

>>85549 Nah, that's the first image that prompted when i searched "rack server". No idea what's that one specifically though dl380 are kino servers. But get a g9 at least. g8s are good but they consume a lot of power for what they do (maybe remove one processor and use SSDs to mitigate this)

>>85540 i have a rpi3, an r630(dual processor xeon), and a thinkcentre 910q in my rack. i removed one of the PSU's on the r630, power isn't too bad.

>>85546 for less than $100 you can get a dell/lenovo/hp/fujitsu tiny pc or sff desktop that is quite capable of doing tons of home server type stuff. 6-7 year old workstations are good for home server stuff that needs more drive bays like a Lenovo P520 or Dell 5820. I see those go for less than $200 on ebay and you can put 4+ 3.5" drives in them and they have tons of PCIe slots for network or drive adapters (m.2, HBA, etc...)

Sure if you actually would use all those cores it's great but for most home servers it's just overkill power waste compared to some cheap second hand sff

>>85558 sure there's an llm that can utilize all the cores

>>85559 llms are useless soykaf

>>85540 I don't really use it because my 7950X3D compiles faster. Its main use is to hist Windows VMs.

>>85546 this site is alright for refurbs and has even more on ebay https://techmikeny.com/ do you know what you want to run or just going to tinker and figure it out later?

Home Server thread? I use this for SMB, JellyFin, and for general remote programming C/C++ programming with VSCode.

>>85563 do you really need the optane cache? is it useful for something more about than saving 0.2ms for querying? does it help if you have 80GBs of ARC in ZFS?

>>85563 If this is going to be another data hoarding / piracy thread then I'm out.

>>85540 are you sure about it?

>>85564 In this case I quite added the cache to it since I got the optane cache for practically free and it probably helps just a bit when I have a workload that involves many small repeated reads like when I'm iteratively compiling large projects. >>85565 I don't really do either I primarily use this for C++ development and graphics-programming with Vulkan. I'm also the off-site "family backup" to the file-server I set up at my parent's house.

>>85547 >>85562 Thanks for the pointers. HP Proliant seems like good value indeed, although I'm still a bit wary because I know their laptops and printers are crap. I would like to run basic homelab stuff. Website, email, git, torrents, Tor/i2p routers,... I want to use a proper server to not feel constrained by memory. Even expensive consumer stuff rarely goes over 64GB. Granted that seems like a lot, I don't like how it's a hard limit with most CPU/motherboard. I'm currently running a blog and a private gitea on a raspberry pi, but it struggles. I wouldn't want to run more dynamic / public stuff without containers (that might be dumb, idk), which I probably can't do on 4GB of ram.

>>85567 I'm just tired of the soykaf "Proxmox is for data hoarding and installing the arr suite" soykaf I see everywhere else. At the end of the day these people should just say they're filthy pirates and move on with their lives.

>>85561 >2-socket Xeon Silver 4114 Where did you get this? You even have AVX-512 on those things.

>>85569 If purchasing isn't owning, piracy isn't stealing so don't go against piracy because it is good. >>85568 Yup, in general you'll find good things in enterprise hardware as capitalism depend on it. this does not happen in consume rhardware

>>85569 I hate the useless *arr soykafware too, but there's nothing wrong with running a lil plex server for you and your family.

>>85568 That doesn't sound like a 'real' server workload to be honest, you could probably scrape by with recycled consumer hardware. For smaller usecases like yours I think you should optimize for power consumption since that's your only real recurring cost. In this sense servers seem to be optimal only if you're actually using all of the computing resources (since the alternative would be running multiple instances of consumer hardware).

Chia ruined second hand prices for stank old servers for years. Still bitter, but still running my dual IB-E Supermicro I picked up before crypto. I should put some bigger drives in it.

If I had to get a spanking brand new server for compliancy reasons what are my options? I just got some quotes for an HP server blade with 16gb of ram and a quad core xeon gold, absolutely disgusting.

>>85570 It's an HPE Proliant. The system is ancient and I don't know why you would want it. >>85575 You do not need a full blown rackmount server to deploy a media server. I run my media server on a Raspberry Pi.

>>85575 Yeah we're in the same page. I've seen the *arr software useful for people who download movies. Not for people who WATCH movies. You know what i'm saying?

>>85620 RPIs are soykaf. They only support USB storage, have soykaf performance, and can't transcode. (and have a proprietary bootloader) Get an x86 minpc that has a spare m.2 slot, or if you're stuck on ARM for whatever reason get one of the newer rockchip boards.

>>85624 Meets my requirements. Sounds like you need to find something that supports yours.

>>85540 not having ECC on ZFS screwed me over last year. never thought it would happen to me but it ended up with an entire dataset gone.

>>85628 nice try. ECC salesman.

If I want to shove a B650D4U3-2L2Q/BCM into a giant fractal tower stuffed with tons of fans (you can't stop me), what would be the go to cpu cooler for such a thing? Not interested in a closed loop. Racks come later.

>>85638 Or failing that, what would be a reasonable rack for such a board with 6 3.5" HDDs and 8 2.5" 7mm SSDs? No CPU, just an HBA.

>>85639 depends on your budget I guess. if you have been here for a while just getting a second hand case with a SAS backplane (I just use SATA) would be the lest complicated option

>>85540 I have a question lainons. I have a regular PC that I use as a server but it's physically out of space for disks. Is there something like a disk enclosure like OP's pic without the computer? I just need something to put my disks into, I'll connect them to my PC. Alternatively, is there an equipment that I can put my disks into and connect them to my PC like an expansion card?

>>85695 Maybe what you need is a network attached storage (NAS). I think you can connect them directly to your PC. Beware when shopping for them, avoid Synology slop.

>>85698 I already use this PC as NAS. My issue is that I ran out of physical space for disks. I need something like a disk enclosure for that.

>>85540 Is it realistic to run in a living room? Taking proliant g9 as example- I could replace those fans that blow onto cpu heatsinks. But the issue is those power supplies. They probably have those screecher fans too. Doubt aftermarket power supplies come in that form factor.

>>85695 Yeah, you can get a disk array enclosure or a disk bay. you can connect them usuing a SAS expansion card >>85698 no you don't need a nas you need a DAE (disk array enclosure)

>>85557 Rocking a ThinkCentre M700 Tiny, with a i3-6100T & 24GB of RAM (picrel), bought it for 100€. Hosting Jellyfin, Transmission & vanilla Minecraft server for friends without any troubles. SFF Desktop are very good as home server.

>>85787 Silly question. You wouldn't happen to be in Serbia?

>>85787 I use a Lenovo Tiny running OmniOS the same way. The expendability is limited, but i still managed to squeeze 3 SSD into it + an external one attached via USB.

>>85810 Absolutely not from Serbia! Why?

Aside the ECC memory there is literally no real difference in between desktop PC and a server PC. You can put Xeon processor in consumer grade ATX, in a computer case off newegg and put as many RAM sticks and hard drives the motherboard allows you to. In reality, when you face the idea that way, you have a simple idea of what "server" really is. A computer. People put them on a server rack for ease of use in huge data centers. They also virtualize it and chop it up for individual users ease of use. That's it. Instead of buying an overpriced computer "server" because of cool factor how about making your own from scratch? Buy a motherboard, buy as many sticks of RAM, hell even buy ECC and high duty HDDs. There are even 2u or 1u server rack computer cases where you can put whatever ATX motherboard you want. t. I fell for the "server cool factor" when I was 18 and bough some soykafbox second hand HPe proliant instead of keeping the money and buying all individual parts and putting them in a basic computer case.

>>85706 DL380 g10s (I think g9s are almost identical) are still pretty loud. On g8s you can flash the iLO firmware to expose fan controls, someone even made a docker container that gives you a nice webUI for controlling them. Personally, I like dell servers, they tend to run a lot quieter stock, I ran an R220 in my bedroom for a few years and it's really pretty quiet. I just got a precision 3930 and that's also super quiet, I have a R240 that I haven't set up yet, but I'm hoping it's pretty quiet too. the G12? Dells also expose fan controls via ipmitool so you can control them with scripting, but I didn't feel the need to set it up with my R220 since it was already quiet.

>>85825 >What's the point of servers >Just buy server drives, a server case and ECC ram >Put your build in a rack case congratulations anon, you built a server. With a desktop board you generally don't have any out of band management/IPMI, your server turns off while you're out? What do you do? A power supply fails? Do you have redundancy with your ATX board? (It's possible, but not readily available) You bought a server designed to sit in a rack in a data center, it's gonna be louder and more expensive. Get a SMB/Edge server and they're miles quieter, often without sacrificing too many features. I have plenty of "desktop" machines running as servers, but I lose out on redundant power and IPMI

>>85639 Super micro does cases that just have power, management and a SAS expander. Enterprise Disk shelves can be okay, but tend to be very noisy and power hungry. >>85623 That's entirely a personal choice, I have a full *arr stack set up, and I use it fairly regularly to find a movie, download it, and tell Jellyfin to rescan all from my phone, by the time I get home the movie/series is ready to watch. >oh, you want to watch X movie? Sure I'll add it now and you'll have it in 20mins to watch >oh, you want to watch this entire series? Sure, I'll add it, when the next season comes out it'll be ready to watch a day or two after >damn I want to listen to X but I forgot to download it before I left the house, I'll just grab add it to lidarr and it'll be pushed to Jellyfin automatically once it's downloaded

>>85833 >20 minutes Usenet was the best thing I ever did. The time between selecting whatever on Ombi and having it in Jellyfin is just a few minutes for me. Too avoid getting too off topic: >>85787 I love my ThinkCenter m700. I turned mine into an OpnSense router to replace my ISP's router. I will say, I think it was a pain in the ass getting it set up the first time, but once I did its been a dream. The control it gives you over your network is so much better. Also it barely takes any of the m700's power to run OpnSense (I run it in a Proxmox container), so I can run plenty of other stuff on it if I want to. That's already on top of my server, so I've honestly got a lot of unused CPU/ram that I need to keep filling with programs.

>>85832 That's literally what I wrote, do you have reading comprehension issues?

>>85851 His point is there are meaningful reasons to buy and use server hardware as opposed to desktop hardware. He said the same thing you did, but he also listed benefits and reasons you didn't. Don't be a dick.

>>85540 >power on >PSHIIIIWWWHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR >24/7 as much as I'd love to, I think my wife and dog would object

Yeah, well -my- wife's deaf, and my cat loves to sit on warm servers. Check-mate, atheists.

>>85825 Agreed. My favorite find has been the ASRock Rack mobos that use consumer AM4/AM5 chips with wayyy better single core than OPs decade old CPUs at a fraction of the power.

>>85833 So it's like an overly complex qbittorrent search torrent feature?

>>85787 I snatched an old thinpad laptop from work for running a minecraft server for some friends for a bit but now i'm stuck with an old L590 with an AMD CPU, while we have tons of those M700 laying around unused in the office. Should've grabbed that instead... tho never too late to go back when i think about it :) I really love lenovo's stuff for ragtag servers though.

>>85555 How's noise? I keep seeing good prices for the r630s but I'm concerned about noise and power. Then again I want to run large LLMs so I'm looking at AI GPU servers which support the SXM2 GPU format

>>85848 >>85787 {Tiny, Mini, Micro} I tried running a M710q with a m.2 2.5G nic but I had trouble with it not showing up all the time. So I run my Dell 3050, but it constantly reboots and I don't know why. Its not great since its meant to be my router.