r/servers

Post kinda says it all, work recently moved our VM's to another system and they know I have been doing a lot of homelabing and asked if I wanted them... I did not think they were this beefy. I'll add full specs in the first comment.

Quick Specs - 1 Server (I have 4):

HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9

Dual Intel Xeon E5-2650 v4 @ 2.20GHz

768GB DDR4-2400 ECC (24x32GB SK Hynix)

Dual 500GB SSDs - I assume this is for boot os

12x 2.5 1.92TB SSDs - Storage (HP enterprise)

So here is what I'm trying to do CORRECTLY

1 Is it generally better to part these out or sell complete systems? Pretty sure its part out... what do I remove/keep in the system? Anything in here I can repurpose in my home lab.. like a dual boot raid controller?

2 Hard drives same thing... is what I have pulled (see first comment) enough/the right data for resale.

3 How do I ensure everything is wiped for resell? With the 2 RAID controllers in these am I better of just pulling each drive individually wiping it clean and then selling or can I do this when they are in the RAID configuration as well?

4 Am I wasting my time installing Proxmox before selling? or is it a good idea to test this and make sure Proxmox can see all the raids/drives/other PCIE cards and stuff.

5 There are 2 other drives I have not been able to find... 200gb sdb and 1tb sdd

What I have done so far, and this is only on 1 of the servers the other 3 are untouched

Attempted to install windows (sda)... kus gaming with that much ram, I gotta try - stuck on boot screen

Installed Fedora (sda) - booted and started poking around

Made a live Debian usbc ssd (sde) so I can boot and clean things up repeatedly

made a image? of the contents of the 32gb sd card in the system... i assume this is recovery software for the factory OS

posting here to avoid mistakes.... which I certainly will not

Can add additional photos if needed THANKS

Optimizing code starts with measuring it, and a measurement is only useful if it is repeatable: a 2% improvement is invisible under 5% of noise. Yet on an untuned machine the same binary can easily run several percent faster or slower between runs. In this post we take a tiny benchmark and tune the machine step by step, re-measuring after every change, until runs become deterministic.

Continue reading—Tuning a Server for Benchmarking

I wanted to share somewhere since there's almost no information about this chip online - only an old wccftech listing that incorrectly lists the TDP as 280W, and some eBay listings that do the same thing.

The 7V73X is an Azure custom bin, only available secondhand. I bought mine from a Chinese seller on eBay. AFAICT it's identical in all respects to a 7773X, except that 7773X has 280W cTDP max, but 7V73X is hard limited to 240W cTDP. I verified using AMD HSMP + E-SMI tool. Mine's installed in an Asrock ROMED8-2T and the only other issue I had was getting the mounting pressure dialed in correctly (manifests as missing DIMM errors otherwise).

Nonetheless I still recomend it if you're looking for a V-Cache build, or trying to save money by going with a DDR4 build. The secondhand version was a lot cheaper than the 7773X equivalent. The only catch is vetting your seller carefully - there were a lot of low-rep seller listings that gave me bad vibes.

How to cool servers on a small scale basis without AIOs?

I need methods for a small server that work well but the server is not big enough to require a major AIO system.

The cost of smaller scale versions of AIOs cannot be justified and cooling systems like internal fans/etc cannot be used.

I have a HP Proliant ML350 Gen10 server. It has a LFF drive cage to accept 3.5" drives and also another SFF drive cage to accept 2.5" drives.

Currently, I am using 2 3.5" HDDs that is set up in RAID 1. However, I would like to completely switch to 2.5" SSDs, also in RAID 1. So I will be obtaining 2 new SSDs.

Would I be able to simply just do these steps:

Insert the 2 new SSDs into server.

Create new RAID 1 array for the 2 new SSDs.

Use Clonezilla on USB flash drive to clone the HDD array to the new SSD array.

Remove both HDD and boot from SSD array

Was talking the other day with a devops guy I know - small team, 5-6 people, and they're still running a couple of dedicated servers in a data center. I was a bit surprised, since I've been doing everything on cloud for years now - Serverspace, Vultr, sometimes DO - and haven't really thought about physical hardware in a while.

But his reasoning was actually interesting: they have workloads with consistently high CPU usage and they just ran the numbers - renting equivalent specs in the cloud was coming out more expensive. Especially when you don't need elasticity - load is stable, no need to scale.
Never really occurred to me to think about it that way.
I'd always assumed dedicated was either for large companies or homelab enthusiasts.

Curious to hear from people who actually run their own iron: is it really mostly a cost story when load is predictable, or are there other reasons I'm missing? And at roughly what scale does it start making sense?

Hi everyone, I am testing an ASUS ESC4000A-E10 server motherboard on a test bench (that was suggested by AI and is not correct. I have a "full" server without disks, ram, cpu). Currently, there is NO CPU installed in the socket. When I plug in the PSU, the motherboard Standby Power LED turns on immediately. However, the Baseboard Management Controller (BMC) LED stays completely off (no blinking, no heartbeat) and I cannot access the web UI. Is it normal for this ASUS AMD EPYC platform to completely halt the BMC boot/power sequencing if the CPU socket is empty? Or should the ASPEED AST2600 chip (BMC) boot up independently regardless of the main CPU? Thanks!

EDIT:

I'll add some further detail:

No sign of life when I press the power buttons (one on the front and another, undocumented, on the rear), no light on the power buttons or the 2 digit start-up progression display (Q-Code), no spinning of the fans.

Psus leds blink green, slowly, I think it means: "we are ok, we are in stand-by, giving 5V to the motherboard (stand-by led on motherboard steady on) waiting for a signal from her to turn on and give 12V"

manual

https://dlcdnets.asus.com/pub/ASUS/server/ESC4000A-E10/Manual/E21771_ESC4000A-E10_UM_V9_WEB.pdf?model=ESC4000A-E10

does not specify if without a cpu the bmc will turn on and give an error.

Tried Google, found almost nothing. Tried AI mode: it allucinates, one time says this is normal without cpu, next time says BMC led should turn on. Most sensible reference he found is this

https://www.asus.com/rs-en/support/faq/1048461/

where Asus says to update BMC firmware install first a cpu.

Please, tell me your opinion.

SOME CONTEXT:

I purchased this on ebay from a reputable professional seller (99.5% positive feedbacks, tens of thousands sold items).

He claims it has been tested and is fully working. I wrote the seller about these symptoms, asking specifically if the cpu was installed. He answered that the listing clearly says no (he's wrong). Till saturday, I can still claim a return, but I really don't want to, if the problem is only the missing cpu. I found a cpu to buy, but it wouldn't arrive for saturday.

I have basically been given 4 isilon server units and I’m unsure how to scale, I currently run a small home server out of an old PC with unraid but now I have a small business worth of equipment. I know I want to have 2 as storage pools and 2 as dedicated game hosting servers. My question is can I patch them all together through network cables are do I have to run SMB shares to sync them all. Sorry for the wording, I am pretty new to servers, I was able to run my NAS with very little outside support and set up the things I want it to do but I’m stepping out of my very small league now.