A Three Server HomeLab for less than $1,000!

putting together your first home lab usually comes with a number of different challenges whether that's the heat generated by the servers the noise your increased power bill the cost of the hardware itself or convincing your significant other you need a home lab in the first place today i'm going to see if i can solve most of those issues for you by showing you how to put together a three server home lab for less than a thousand dollars although you're going to need to fix that last problem on your own today's video is brought to you by lexar and the nm 610 pci express nvme drive available in 250 gig 500 gig and one terabyte capacities it makes the perfect upgrade for your laptop or desktop pc featuring nvme 1.3 gen 3x4 and speeds up to three and a half times faster than sata it's the surefire way to supercharge your pc get into your games faster with the lexar nm 610 nvme drive click the link down in the video description to learn more welcome back to craft computing everyone as always i'm jeff and this could be your first home lab as i said in the intro today i'm going to put together three home lab servers that cost me just a little over three hundred dollars a piece giving me a full home lab for less than a thousand bucks i know i know i already built one off camera and i'm sorry but that wound up being a very good thing as building a 2u server is sometimes a little bit difficult so it can present problems that you can fix before you dive into building the rest of your home lab instead of waiting two or three days for like a cable extension to arrive so let's take a look inside of here and see what we're working with [Music] so for starters here's how the server turned out and i know it's definitely no looker but we really weren't going for the best looks we were going for functionality on a budget the chassis itself was actually the most expensive component inside of here at about 85 this is a rosewill 2u unit and it doesn't need any rails to support it inside of your rack meaning that any four post or even a two post rack should be able to support this chassis just fine i did source some 2u high coolers and we'll cover those in just a minute and all of the servers are going to have an m.2 sata ssd boot disk as well as two 2 terabyte spinning drives for raw storage one last thing about the chassis is it does come with a pair of 80 millimeter fans that are mounted right there up front and blow directly into where the processor sits and also helps keep one of the hard drives cool now these drives shouldn't get too warm as they are just sata 7200 rpm discs and there is no fan blowing over this drive but that hasn't been a problem thus far as you can see i could go with a little bit more cable management if i put some time and effort into it but none of this really restricts any of the airflow inside the server so it just visually looks bad and once it's inside your rack you really won't care about it anyway so as you can see there's really nothing earth-shattering about the hardware that's in here but it should still allow us to run pretty much any operating system we want now what exact hardware are we putting inside there's not going to be any prizes awarded for guessing which platform i decided to go with as of course it's a chinese x79 board this particular motherboard is the machinist boutique motherboard high quality indestructible diamond quality um i doubt that but it definitely does work now there's a couple reasons why i chose this motherboard in particular number one it was one of the cheapest x79s you can get at just 65 number two is this is actually a micro atx form factor motherboard and it follows the standard you won't believe how many off-market boards that i've bought like this that have irregular hole patterns or don't follow the actual size guidelines and so you end up with four or five or six inches of board hanging off the last screw hole that's actually in the motherboard in this case we have our four screws for the mini itx form factor and then two additional screw holes right below it meaning that when this is installed into the case it sits in there nice and solid and there's no wobbly bit towards the bottom the vrm solution is definitely more than adequate especially for the cpu that we're going to be running today and it does have a heatsink which helps keep things nice and cool the motherboard does have a couple downsides first and foremost there is only one sata 3.0 port the other three are sata 2.0 meaning that you're not going to get a ton of bandwidth out of your storage additionally this board only supports two channels of memory instead of the four that the x79 platform should have so that is going to limit our memory bandwidth quite significantly now it's not a big deal in my case which is why i ultimately decided to go with this motherboard but if you are running programs that are a little bit more memory bandwidth dependent this may not be the best option for you beyond that the build quality of this board is quite good and it does have pretty much every feature that i would want to set up a beginner virtualization lab so it's going in the box next up is my cpu choice and this one is definitely going to be a little bit controversial but hear me out on my reasoning this is the xeon e5 2648l and it is a 65 watt eight core 16 threaded processor now at just 65 watts this is the lowest wattage ship that's ever been released for the intel 2011 platform and that does come with a couple downsides number one it is only 1.8 gigahertz on those 8 cores and 16 threads but that should be pretty reasonable as long as we have a decent turbo right yeah this chip has no turbo boost meaning it is 1.8 gigahertz all the time now again that's really not a deal breaker for the use case that i'm presenting here which is a low cost low power low wattage and low heat generating server and at just 65 watts you still get eight cores and 16 threads and this should be more than plenty to handle most home lab needs if you still want to go low cost but you need a little bit more power you could also go with the xeon e5 2650 and this is one of my favorite chips on the platform it's still eight core 16 threads and only has a two gigahertz base clock but it does turbo all the way up to 2.5 gigahertz across all eight cores and this can be had for about 30 whereas this chip i picked up for 13 and i bought three of them so they were probably laughing at me all the way to the bank up next is our memory and i got four eight gigabyte sticks of ddr3 ecc registered memory running at 1866 megahertz now i believe the max that this board will actually boost up to is 1600 megahertz but that still gives us a decent amount of memory bandwidth to work with even if it is only on two channels now i got really lucky when i picked these up on ebay as they only cost me about eight dollars per stick and i bought 12 of them your mileage may vary there but don't be afraid to make an offer on memory like this even though this usually runs between 12 and 15 dollars per stick keeping our cpus cool are going to be the super micro 2u active heat sinks and these only cost me about 10 a piece now the reason they were so inexpensive is they are a little bit mangled up on top as you can see a lot of the fins have been bent you can also see it there on the back side these aren't in the greatest condition and they did come filthy covered in an ungodly amount of thermal paste but they do clean up just fine on the bottom as you can see it's nice and shiny silver down there and the fans work perfectly fine so if you're willing to get a little elbow grease into your project these were a pretty good deal at ten dollars next up let's talk power supply this is a 350 watt uh power man power supply that's not even 80 plus rated however these come in a lot of oem towers and you can get them pretty inexpensive i paid only 14 each for these and they are factory new now let's go over our storage as i mentioned we are going to be using an m.2 sata ssd in this case this is a sunbow 32 gigabyte yeah it's not a whole lot of storage but it will get your os up and running and we can use our mechanical storage for everything else for those mechanical drives we're going to be going with a pair of hgst 2 terabyte discs these are 7 200 rpm models and we're also factory new and i picked them up for just 22 dollars a piece you might have seen a pci express card in my example build because in fact there was one because i wanted video out on my servers and the x79 platform doesn't have onboard video out so i picked up three of these this is the ati b170 this is a low profile 256 megabyte graphics card that is passively cooled and has dvi and s video outputs yeah that really ages it doesn't it that in the fact that it was made by ati what made me ultimately decide on this card well besides the six dollar price point is the dvi a connector right here up front this will output an analog signal as well as a digital signal meaning that we can convert this port into vga dvi or hdmi and connect it to any monitor that we need and that works out great for me because the kvm console in my server rack will only work with vga and last but not least is the case which incidentally comes with a free cat this is the roswell rsv z2700 and it is a 2u chassis right around half depth and best of all it was only 85 brand new on amazon and i'm gonna need what's in that box hey you i'm gonna need that can i have my case please the gates itself has a pretty nice finish all black powder coated there are two usb ports on the front of it as well as a power and reset button and your network power and hard drive activity lights the top is held in with four screws two on each side of the case and around the back we've got the motherboard tray for pci expansion slots that are low profile only and our atx power supply mount now the interesting thing about the atx power supply mount is pretty much the one downside of this case in that there's really no ventilation for an atx power supply you can see there are vents cut out in the top of this but as servers are meant to be stacked on top of each other as soon as you put a server on top of this your power supply can no longer breathe would you stop it rambo has made himself a tent out of the box so now that we know what i'm putting together let's go ahead and get it all put together so this again is the rosewill rsv z2700 2u case black powder coat i believe it's also available in white although don't quote me on that color yeah we can check out the plethora of accessories that await us a bag of screws a speaker and a three-page user manual so we're gonna start by taking out all of the drive trays to get ourselves a little bit more room here these drive trays are held in with two screws on the very front and then they pull back and lift out of the case just like so as far as what cables are available inside of this case this has always confused me just a little bit so the gray cable stack we have our standard hard drive light power light and network card light as well as a single usb header on the red black and white cabling we have another usb header as well as our power switch and reset switch why these couldn't have been a single lead coming off the front header or at least combine the usb and the front i o i don't know the only other thing left in here is the 280 millimeter fans and both of those use a molex power connector now it's time to install the motherboard screw standoffs and bonus points if you can guess what i'm going to complain about next so you're probably asking yourself self didn't jeff say there were six mounting holes on that motherboard not five you're absolutely right let me show you so this machinist board that i was so happy to find with a proper micro atx screw pattern turns out that there are two variants to the microatx pattern and both of them are correct first off you can have a hole right here you can also have a hole that is an inch lower than that now if we look inside the case we have one hole over here on the left and we have one hole over here on the right in most cases they accommodate for both hole patterns so you can move the standoff up or down in this case they assumed you would only be mounting i guess a larger pattern board and they only populated the lower screw which means after all that we're still going to have only five mounting points and one end of the board kind of floating now this obviously isn't the end of the world because the motherboard really doesn't hang that far below the next closest screw but i am a little disappointed with this case that it didn't have all of the proper standoff mounts for a micro atx motherboard especially when that's the only motherboard size you can mount in here now i want to get the rear i o wired in as it is kind of in a hard to reach location here near the back of the motherboard and i don't want to have to fight with the power supply and the video card and other things in order to do that another thing to watch out for on this motherboard is right next to the front panel i o this may look like a usb front header in fact that is a serial port header your usb headers are actually these two ones further up front turning our attention to the power supply now there is only one way you can mount this in this case and that is with the fan facing up now that we have the power supply installed our first hiccup is pretty apparent and that is cable length if i were to stretch the 24 pin as far as i can it will kind of plug into this header but it also makes this a lot tighter than i would like it to be as far as the eight pin cable goes it's a good three to four inches short of reaching the eight pin header on the board so to solve that i picked up a set of cable extensions that looks something like this we have an 8 pin and a 24 pin and our 24 pin goes just like so and our 8 pin does the exact same thing now the motherboard has power we need to do the same thing to our fans and to the hard drives that we'll be mounting up front to do that we plugged both of the fan pigtails into a single molex adapter and we're going to plug in the one molex connector that's on this power supply that can just kind of be tucked under there now we have one sata plug ready to go into this hard drive over here and we have a second sata plug ready to go into the second drive to get the hard drives connected we're going to plug in a couple of sata cables to our sata 2.0 ports note i am leaving the sata 3.0 port open in case i want to add an ssd to the system later on getting the sleds installed is pretty simple there's a couple of pegs down here on the bottom of the sled that line up with these holes right here simply drop the pegs into the holes and slide the sled forward and same thing for the next tray and finally last but not least it is time to get our video card installed and even though i bought pretty much the smallest video card that i could find it is still a very tight fit to get it in here [Music] there we go we've got about i don't know maybe a quarter inch behind the hard drive and another three-eighths of an inch before it hits the sata plug so it does fit but barely and just like that server two is now complete uh i'd walk you through what's in here but i feel like we just did that twice so i think it'd be a little redundant so now about the only thing left for me to do is to build server number three and then get these all put into the rack but why am i building these servers when i already have a garage full of servers well mainly because there's a big difference between having servers in your house and running essential services on them and having a set of servers to tinker with and experiment on while the servers i have do a great job they're also not for tinkering with and experimenting on because they provide critical services here at my house such as my nas for all my video editing needs my pi hole server for whole home ad blocking even my minecraft server which my daughter and a lot of my family play on having servers in my network sack that i can tinker on and experiment with leaves me with a little bit of peace of mind now if i break something i can simply wipe it and start over and nothing is lost with all that said i'm gonna go and flip the camera into time lapse mode build server number three and i will see you out in the garage right after the break [Music] [Applause] so and welcome back out to the garage it is time to get our servers mounted and my plan is i'm going to mount them right here where these blank panels are at almost as if i had planned this from the very beginning and over on this side i should have pretty much everything i need of course my three completed servers i've got a full set of cage nuts and rack screws i've got a screwdriver and i'm going to be using a freezer as a table i hope that's acceptable i don't have a wood one handy and before we get started you might notice my cable modem is just kind of hanging out here on top of my rack console uh i do have a rack mount solution for this in the works but it's not quite ready today but you'll be seeing that in a future video but for right now let's go ahead and get these things mounted up we're going to be starting on number 25 right here and just mounting a cage nut in the center of all of these another handy use for your rackmount console it can serve as a shelf while you're putting things in number one is going to be the most difficult here because i have nothing to set it on so i'm gonna have to hold it in place while i'm screwing it in and while it's lighter than most servers it's still not light dropped one screw why didn't i bring my magnetic tip screwdriver out here kism genius i don't know why i even keep this one around there we go let's try doing it this way hey i got one there we go [Music] luckily once you have one server in everything on top of it is way easier and as adam savage would say ladies and gentlemen there it is your starting home lab uh i'm really happy with the way this went now there are dozens of different directions you could go with a build like this and so don't think of this as really a part by part exactly what you need to buy think of this more as a template that you can modify to fit your own needs and i will admit i am two for three on these servers starting up right now as server 2 doesn't want to boot up i'm pretty sure it has a bad memory stick so i'll be diagnosing that one later but the other two fired right up and in fact i have windows installed on server number one just so we can get a cinebench run on it to show you how the cpu performs now i know you probably won't be able to read this but the cpu itself is idling at 1200 megahertz and we're going to go ahead and hit run cpu test and we can see now it's running at 1800 megahertz and like i said there's no turbo clock on this cpu so 1800 megahertz is all you're gonna get the really nice thing about 1800 megahertz is this cpu is running at 37 degrees celsius under a full cinebench workload and that is absolutely insane and that's without the air conditioning blowing onto it as my console is in the way so as you can see in the render here it's not exactly a world beater but this will certainly get the job done with 8 cores and 16 threads for whatever virtualization system you would like to run and the results are in we scored a 629 which is not all that terrible but it's also not all that great as far as an 8 core cpu goes either to put that in perspective the e5 2650 scored an 840 which is about 33 percent faster than the 2648l but it does this by wait for it drawing only two-thirds of the power compared to the 2650 and each of these machines is only capable of drawing about a hundred watts from the wall at full tilt so while these are not going to blow the doors off of any benchmark that you throw at them they are still fully competent for virtual machine hosts and they're not going to break the bank for your power bill either so why did i decide to build my own home lab servers rather than buying a used server off of ebay well a couple different reasons for starters power draw and noise and i kind of put these into the same category depending on the server you get the fan speed is going to be a wild card some servers will let you ramp them down to near inaudible levels others like to run a hundred percent all the time and when i say 100 i don't mean a knock to a 1500 rpm i mean 12 000 rpm blower fans those fans are also a major source in the power draw for the server you're running your fans fast well those fans could easily be drawing 20 watts apiece and that adds up really quick especially if you're going for efficiency second up is price and components and i'm kind of lumping this one together as well typically in the 300 price range you're going to be looking at something like a dell r420 while the server does have two cpu sockets you're limited to nehalem and westmere chips with a max of 6 cores and 12 threads each compare that to something on the x79 platform for example my e5 2648l where this pretty much tied the performance of an x5690 i've previously tested a pair of x5650s which is one of the more popular chips to put into a dell r420 those 12 cores and 24 threads put together scored a 1279 inside a cinebench compare that to an e5 2670 which is eight cores and 16 threads which scored at 1100 oh and that 2670 also draws half the power of the pair of x5650s so there you have it a starting home server lab in a future video i am planning on installing proxmox on at least two of these servers and setting them up in a cluster so make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss that video also now that i'm not having to test things on my production servers what do you want to see me install on my home lab let me know down in the comments below be sure to like this video if you liked it and subscribe to crafty computing if you haven't done so already follow me on twitter at craft computing to keep up with my daily shenanigans and if you like the content you see on this channel and want to help support me and what i do consider joining the patreon link is down in the video description thank you all so much for watching this one and as always i will see you in the next video cheers all [Music] you

Channel: Craft Computing

Views: 188,547

Keywords: homelab, ProxMox, of sense, home lab server, beginner homelab, chinese x79, server build, cheap homelab server

Id: onMD8tvnLbs

Length: 23min 31sec (1411 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020