Server advice - fairly new to enterprise h/w but want to learn

Jayos · 23 Jul 2021 at 18:06

I have been building PC's for years and pretty tech savie. I currently use Draytek vigor 130 ubiquiti security gateway with ubiquiti 16 port switch and ubiquiti access point pro (WiFi)

Also have a freenas server where I host unifi controller within a jail and of course for storage. This was originally built with consumer grade, but I upgraded to Xeon cpu and ecc ram
I have an old synology NAS on a seperate network for hosting a website, but this is fairly old and really needs replacing.

I would like to setup a Ubuntu server to run VM's to host websites isolated from each other with specific IP's with something like proxmox or VMWare esxi and would like to use enterprise hardware, but there are so many options and I am not really that familiar with it.
Looking on ebay for second hand to start and tinker or maybe I bite the bullet and go new.
Also I want to test and try new things to learn more. If possible give myself some flexibility to upgrade and enhance in the future.

What would you recommend as a starting point? I was looking at things like a 2nd hand Dell T620 with 2x E5-2640 and 64GB ddr or a R540 rackmount
Any help and advice would be great.

Lets say 4 websites - nothing requiring significant resources or high traffic just simple small business type sites.
Maybe a local DNS, Kemp Load Balancer (Just so I can learn)

LizardKing · 23 Jul 2021 at 22:33

Is this just personal usage or are you looking to apply what you learn to a job of some-sort down the line? if the later then save the money and grab yourself an azure/aws account and use the free allowances/services to build with the likes of their app service plans, docker, kubernetes, scale sets etc. This is where the future lies for any kind of hosting in this day and age.

If its just a hobby then yeah a dell of sorts off the bay with a proper raid card not those onboard hunk o junks

, a tpm for the best chance of some level of compatibility down the line (that may be hard find though with the likes of r540 era machines). They do like to eat elec though even if they are just idling. oh and one with an idrac for that sweet network access to the console/bios/raid. CPU/RAM/storage is much of muchness really.

Jayos · 24 Jul 2021 at 11:47

Personal use, I think the bay may be the cheaper route, found myself going down a rabbit hole looking at supermicro mobo's and other components to build myself but cost soon jumps up. I see gigabyte, asrock and asus all now offer server mobo's I guess maybe a bit more affordable when compared to enterprise h/w but not as resilient.
maybe an option for personal use, what would opinions be on the debate of AMD vs INTEL CPU's?

LizardKing · 25 Jul 2021 at 15:49

If its just personal use then i wouldnt bother getting dedicated server m/b beyond an ebay special server of some sort, they dont bring any performance gains and may even be problematic with drivers etc, with a proper server from the likes of Dell/HP you know they will have certified/tested drivers etc.

The intels dont really touch the epyc at the moment but anything from amd prior to the epyc's i wouldnt touch with a barge pole

BongoHunter · 26 Jul 2021 at 00:15

For my home lab type servers I went Ryzen this time around, I use a Asrock B450 Pro 4 with a Ryzen 2700 and 64GB of RAM and it was much cheaper than the Intel equivalent.

Edit: My NAS uses a Ryzen 2600 with 32GB ECC ram and had no issues in 18 months of 24x7 use

Caged · 26 Jul 2021 at 10:20

What do you want to learn? There's very little value now in knowing your way around a rack server unless you want to do onsite repairs for Dell, be remote hands for a company that has to run everything on-prem, or see your future in supporting businesses that spend on their infrastructure about once every decade.

If you want to host websites then as suggested above, get yourself an AWS account and start learning how to build the infrastructure from a code repo and then automatically deploy the website onto it.