Which Machine Would You Use

[barneycalhoun]

I am in a little bit of an indecisive place at the moment. I am currently running Proxmox on a very basic desktop that runs 3 different Ubuntu servers. I just brought back from an office I closed out of state a Dell T410. I am wondering if I should redo the Dell, keep things on the current setup, or just rethink everything and eventually go with a newer machine down the road. I am not looking to spend a lot of money, as these are not revenue-generating assets. The Dell T410 used to be a revenue-generating server for me a few years back when hosting simple web sites and email in an ESXI environment, but that's long gone.

I was thinking of using the Dell T410, and using 4 of the PCIe slots to add 4x NVMe drives to run VMs, and utilize the RAID array in RAID10 to run a standard data storage array. Just the fact that I have a total of 12 cores and a good amount of RAM in the T410 means I could put my slim budget towards larger capacity NVMe drives. Below are the hardware specs of each machine. Thanks for thoughts, I tend to second think my ideas.

Current Proxmox machine specs:
ASUS motherboard
Intel Pentium Gold G7400
8GB DDR4 RAM (upgradeable to 64GB)
2x NVME (pcie gen3) on-board slots
-1x 512GB NVMe used for proxmox base system and ISO storage
-1x 512GB NVMe used for both main Ubuntu servers - one running single wordpress site the second running a multi-location Unifi server
1x 512GB NVMe drive via PCIe adapter used for creating and testing new VMs - non-essential machines.
2x SATA SSD drives for backup.

Dell T410 currently not in use:
2x Xeon X5660
64GB DDR3 ECC RAM
PERC H700 SAS controller
-6x HGST 4TB SAS HDD in RAID5
1x 120GB SATA SSD for OS
1x 250GB SATA SSD for generic storage

 

[UdoB]

Well, did you compare the power consumption? (I am in Germany, and costs for energy are insane.)

From the technical details I would prefer the Dell for one Detail: ECC Ram.

Unfortunately the H700 is not ZFS-compatible and I do not know if it can be flashed to an "IT-mode" equivalent...


Disclaimer: I am a little bit biased pro Dell

 

[barneycalhoun]

Well, did you compare the power consumption? (I am in Germany, and costs for energy are insane.)

From the technical details I would prefer the Dell for one Detail: ECC Ram.

Unfortunately the H700 is not ZFS-compatible and I do not know if it can be flashed to an "IT-mode" equivalent...


Disclaimer: I am a little bit biased pro Dell

I did do a comparison, and actually hooked up both machines to separate UPS units to track watt usage. It's about triple the power usage. Power rates are about middle of the road here in TX. I'm not too worried about it, and feel spending another $1500-$2500 on a newer used server wouldn't equal out power saving costs for another 10 years.

 

[Johannes S]

If energy costs are not a concern I would go with the Dell and keep the old machine as combined ProxmoxBackupServer/Emergency Virtualization host ( in case the Dell gets broken). This is easy made by installing PBS on the existing machine. On the New machine you would have a low-retention PBS VM or lxc, you hen would wake up the backup host every might ( e.g. with wakeoverlan) to sync the backups to it.

I would also swap out the SAS Controller to have one working with ZFS.

 

[alexskysilk]

Unfortunately the H700 is not ZFS-compatible and I do not know if it can be flashed to an "IT-mode" equivalent...

It can. its just a generic LSI Raid controller- but you lose all integrated firmware control (which is probably ok for zfs use, just sayin.)

OP- what I didnt see in your post is WHY. what is the painpoint you are trying to solve, or is this just for fun?