With Patreon, Facebook, and DeviantArt more or less making this blog redundant for art-related things, I’ve decided to use it for my other projects.
I can’t count how many times I’ve been stuck on some problem during a project and stumbled across a helpful stranger’s blog with the exact answer I needed. I figured I would start adding my own projects here, in case someone else down the line ends up in my situation.
That said, here we go!
I just recently upgraded my home server–a massive jump from a Raspberry Pi 3 to an HP DL360 G6.
Hardware
Anyway, I got a great deal on eBay. In all:
DL360 G6 (2xX5550, 20GB RAM, 0 HDD) $45 + 30 shipping
2xL5630 Xeons $12
Total: $87 shipped
I bought the extra Xeon L5630 set to drop the overall power consumption. Going from a Raspberry Pi, anything was going to be a huge jump in power usage, so I tried to soften the blow to my electricity bill as much as possible. Each L5630 has a TDP of 40w, with only a small drop in processing speed compared to the 95w X5550’s. More on power later.
Software
I eventually settled on using Proxmox as my hypervisor. I’ve only used ESXi in the past, but I knew I would be primarily running Linux machines and I read that Proxmox had better native Docker container support. Of course, having a fully-featured hypervisor for free was a big advantage too.
I ran into some issues getting the hypervisor installed in the beginning. I was able to update the server’s firmware with no problems, but I couldn’t get the Proxmox installer to recognize my hard drive. Turns out, I needed to reset the P410i RAID controller and then initialize my single disk BEFORE doing anything else. You can get to the RAID setup menu during the bootup sequence by pressing any key to get to the option ROM menu, then pressing F8. This should bring up the menu to initialize and configure your disks. After that, install was a breeze.
For now, I’m only running Ubuntu Server 16.04 so that the network wouldn’t be down very long. Once everything I had running on the RPi is up I’ll have plenty of time to experiment with newer features in another virtual machine.
It was fairly straightforward to reinstall everything I was using on the Pi, and I even managed to get a few Docker containers set up running Deluge and Plex. I’m looking forward to learning more about Docker–I couldn’t believe how easy it was to create and destroy containers. I plan on looking into it more soon.
It’s also nice to finally have transcoding available on Plex–something that was absolutely not possible when running on the Pi.
Power
According to HP’s iLO console, I have been pulling an average of 82w on this machine, with a peak power draw of 146w. Not bad! Of course, I’ve only got one virtual machine running and a single 2.5″ HDD (I know, redundancy is the next planned upgrade), but that’s completely acceptable. I want to get a Kill-a-watt meter to double-check how accurate these readings are, but they seem alright to me.
Final Thoughts
This server is the first device in my IKEA Lack Rack. It’s surprisingly quiet, especially for a 1U server. While I was setting it up, it made less noise than my MicroATX desktop, which I already thought was practically silent. (It sounds like a jet during the bootup sequence, but why would I turn it off?)
I’m very pleased with what I’ve been able to do so far, and can’t wait to dig in more. Especially for the price, it’s hard to argue with the end results. For anyone looking to make their own homelab, I greatly recommend doing a bit of research then heading over to eBay–there are tons of machines just like this that companies are practically giving away. Just make sure you don’t get anything older than an LGA1366 socket for Intel, or you’ll regret it when your electricity bill comes in.
Other than adding more hard drives, I am also looking into virtualizing pfSense to use as my new router. More to come on that in a later post!
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