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.
I’ve heard good things about Incus, otherwise Proxmox is the default these days.
For a ‘dyi’ ‘rack’ you can get a LACK table from IKEA. https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack
Esxi is on its way out after the purchase of Broadcom and the price increase of 300%. Proxmox is one way forward but others are also exploring Hyper-V, Open Shift, and XCP.
Jim’s Garage just released a 2 part series (so far) on home labbing with video 2 being for proxmox installation.
https://wwelw.youtube.com/@Jims-Garage/videosCraigslist and facebook marketplace will usually get you some racks cheap. it’s also bot too difficult to build one either out of metal or wood.
Thanks!
I use ebay. Not sure what the market is like in Canada.
Proxmox is great. If you ever used vCenter, you should pick it up no problem. It’s just Debian, so stick the installer in and point it at your boot drive.
Unless you have the space and need for a rack, I’d skip it. It’ll run happily no matter where you put it, in any orientation.
If it doesn’t have the iLO license, you might be able to get one from ebay as well. I’ve done that for Dells. Pretty sure it was just an outsourced Dell support tech making a couple bucks by abusing their access to the license generator. Certainly not legal, but it works just fine.
That’s great to know, all four of my other machines are running Debian right now so I should have a pretty good idea of what’s up!
That probably is what I will do for some time, leaning it gently and securely against a wall somehow, but in the future rack would be nice - especially if I find some enterprise firewall for sale or something.
Also really happy to hear ebay might have iLO licenses - I have grabbed a couple one-time licences off there for windows machines before, but I didn’t know they sometimes had stuff like this too.
Personally I did something similar here. You could likely find a rack for free if you look at to colos, data centers or schools. I got a 60u full enclosed rack from the colo I kept my servers at. The big problem was space. People look to get rid of them because they are such a burden in space.
Good stuff getting a gen9. I got a gen8 before I realized that there were firmware limitations particularly with a lack of support for gpt. I instead needed a really hacky workaround with mbr in order to run my name ssd as the boot drive at full capacity.
Also I like to drop this tool occasionally for any new homelabbers.
Thanks for the tips and the link, that’s super useful!
Congrats on the acquisition!
DL380 G9
Does this machine have its iLO license? If so, you’re in for a treat, if you’ve never used IPMI or similar out-of-band server management. Starting as a glorified KVM, it then has full power control authority (power on/off, soft reset, hard reset), either a separate or shared Ethernet connection, virtual CD and USB, SNMP reporting, and other whiz-bang features. Used correctly, you might never have to physically touch the machine after installation, except for parts replacement.
What is your go-to place to source drive caddies or additional bays if needed?
When my Dell m1000e was missing two caddies, I thought about buying a few spares on eBay. But ultimately, I just 3d printed a few and that worked fine.
Finally, server racks are absurdly expensive of course. Any suggestions on DIY’s for a rack would be appreciated.
I built my rack using rails from Penn-Elcom, as I had a very narrow space I wanted to fit my machines. Building an open-frame 4-post rack is almost like putting a Lego set together, but you will have to take care to make sure it doesn’t become a parallelogram. That is, don’t impart a sideways load.
Above all, resist the urge to get by with a two-post rack. This will almost certainly end in misery, considering that enterprise servers are not lightweight.
Unsure about the iLO, but I do recall powering on one of these remotely in school using it. I’ll have to wait until I find some power cable to take a look I believe, but I do see a sticker with the default user name and password for it on the side, so here’s hoping haha.
I have a PLA 3d Printer, but I fear PLA has too low of a melting point to use for server components. It would be neat if there were a caddie model out there I could test with though - will have to look around.
Thanks for the insight on the rack as well, that will be good to know in the future I am certain.
