Hey all,
As stated, I have somehow acquired an entire DL380 G9 for $150 CAD in basically never-used condition and both Xeons present (There is aesthetic marks on the chassis, but actually 0 dust inside. It’s also lacking RAM).
I messed around with a couple of these things in college, but it’s been a bit since I dealt with the hardware side of servers and setting one up from bottom floor, so I just had a few questions if anyone wants to offer advice.
There is only a single 8 drive bay installed on it currently, and it does not have all of its caddies. What is your go-to place to source drive caddies or additional bays if needed? I’d also be interested in hearing recommendations on suppliers of 2.5" spinning drives, RAM, and power cables.
Back in college we used to put ESXi on these things, but after looking it up I can see that there is no longer a free edition. Is Proxmox the de-facto solution for bare metal hypervisors theses days? Either way, if anyone has any videos covering the process for installation on this hardware, I would appreciate it (though I can probably sus it out with enough time as well).
Finally, server racks are absurdly expensive of course. Any suggestions on DIY’s for a rack would be appreciated.
Glad to answer any additional questions if needed - thanks for your time.
What is your use case? I ask because ESXi is free again, but it’s probably not a useful skill to learn these days. At least not as much as the competition.
Similarly, 2.5" mechanical drives only make sense for certain use cases. Otherwise I’d get SSDS or a 3.5" DAS.
Personal system but I work in technology, so learning solutions used in industry is always handy.
I want spinning disks as they have shorter life but a wider mean time between failure, which should be better for the RAID I want to configure.
Since SSDs have a definitive number of writes in their lifetime, as I recall it can be kind of dangerous to install several new ones at the same time in something like a raid 1 configuration.