Dell PowerEdge R610 Review – Virtualization On The Cheap

[Music] hey what's going on everybody this is Rob Willis Todd info here and in this video I want to talk about the newest set of servers I've picked up and that's gonna be this set of dell poweredge or six-tenths that you see here so I always say that it doesn't have to be expensive to get into virtualization and running your own servers and these servers are a prime example of just that I picked up both of these off eBay for about $500 us for the set they both have dual six core Xeon Intel processors 48 gig of ram and they actually also have a full-blown park six I RAID controller as well all right so just jumping right into things in the front here you'll see six two and a half inch drive bays two USB ports a DVD ROM and the typical Dell LCD readout and you might notice something interesting in the bottom left there but I'll actually get into that in another video and then we have six fans blowing front to back or dual CPUs here with the RAM on the sides and this chassis the 610 will take up to 192 gigs of ram and then right there in the center is going to be the perc 6 I RAID controller and then the top right in the back there that black square with the blue dot is actually gonna be the enterprise Drac controller so as you can tell this is a bit of a feature pack server and in this very small form-factor and that's what makes it perfect for virtualization you can get a ton of CPU a ton of RAM and even a decent bit of local storage and then have quite a few of these within a single server rack alright so let's just take a quick peek around in the back and see what's going on back there so you'll notice on the right-hand side we have two power supplies in these units and they're going to be the high output or 717 watt versions we've got four built-in gig bits there which is very nice to have along with two USB ports our VGA port a serial port and then along with our dedicated idrac6 port and this is the enterprise so that's why it has the the dedicated port along with the SD slot above there but I'm not sure what I can use that for yet it's first time I've ever had one of those but yeah that's kind of the run down to the physical chassis so let's go ahead and boot this thing up real quick alright so now I'm over on my Windows 10 machine and I went ahead and put the IP address of the Drac since it has that a dedicated NIC for just the Drac itself it also has a dedicated IP address as well so I'm gonna go ahead and log into that and that will give me the Java console access so I can access the server just like as if I was sitting directly in front of it with a keyboard a mouse and a monitor directly hooked up this is the typical way you access servers remotely whenever you can't physically get to them which is up just generally easier to to manage servers as well I'm so going to go ahead and pull that up and then I'll go ahead and power on the server [Music] all right so now you have a little bit of an idea of what it sounds like it boot up and then once it starts to idle down as you may have noticed my server stack was right next to that when I recorded that so you heard a lot of that interfering in there as well but it also shows kind of how it stands out it that whenever boots up and goes full throttle there how it gets a little bit louder and then kind of starts to blend in but basically at this point I'm going to go ahead and let the server boot up a little bit all of this stuff takes forever to get going so I'm gonna skip through it a little bit just to speed things up but we'll go ahead and check out the basic bios the RAID controller the track settings and whatnot and so I'll just go ahead and skip ahead a little bit to when it's uh boot it up a little bit more all right so we finally see our little boot menu pop up in the top right hand corner there so I'm going to go ahead and press f2 to enter the system setup or the BIOS but it's gonna still gonna take a second to actually get into that menu system because it has to boot the RAID controller and some of the other services system components as well before we even enter that so it's good to be a minute so go ahead and fast forward to when we get in there and then I'll show that real quick all right and we finally made it into our BIOS menu but as you can expect it's just a typical layout you can set your time there's some a few memory settings processor settings you could enable virtualization here your boot sequences that kind of stuff power management the bio security and stuff like that you know typical bio stuff so let's go ahead and exit out of there and then I'll reboot and we'll go ahead and check out the RAID controller and the track next all right so I went ahead and rebooted the server and you're gonna see that it's gonna say press control R to run the configuration utility so go ahead and do that now and we see that I've already got two raid zero disk configured here and it just shows you my basically out there's one disk in each and then if I hit f2 for the operations on the disk I can initialize it or um if I go to the controller I can go ahead and create a new array and stuff like that and then if you hit control and it'll take you to the next page which is the PD management and then there's the controller management after that there's some various options under there and you can find your health statuses under the PD management so as you can see it's a very basic utility that does exactly what it's supposed to do you'll generally only ever use this if you're creating or deleting raid arrays so with that being said let's go ahead and take a look at the idrac controller not real quick all right so the server's been rebooted again and we should see the idrac settings pop up here in just a second and you see it says press ctrl e to access the remote access setup and it takes us into the menu system so this is where you'll basically go to configure all things for the dedicated track itself so like you've got options for the LAN settings here if we just scroll down oops I didn't mean to do that but on that land parameters here this is where you'll set the IP address the DNS server is the Gateway all of those kind of things there's the ipv6 settings the speed the duplex all of that kind of stuff all right let's do it other options we have here there's the virtual media configuration and the there's some settings there the B flash that's the I think that's the SD card that I mentioned was above the the Drac port in the back of the server there the LCD configuration you can change what's out put the little screen in the front of the server you can also reset the account that's used to login to the track you can you could change all that information here and that's really all there is to it it's another very basic very dedicated menu system that just does exactly what it's supposed to do and I think that's where I'm gonna wrap this one I hope this video gave you guys an idea of just how cheaply you can get a very decent server nowadays and I get your own lap going and get started with this kind of stuff and hopefully it helps you out to a little bit if you're looking to pick up one of these jassi's it helps give you an idea of things to look for and what kind of features and options are available I know I'm super excited about some of the projects I'm gonna be having going on around these two chassis and the first one's gonna be in an H a open set setup which I'm super stoked about but yeah so as always I'd like to thank you guys for watching and I'll see you next time

Channel: Rob Willis

Views: 111,746

Rating: 4.9035316 out of 5

Keywords: Dell, PowerEdge, R610, iDrac, ESXi, VMware, OPNsense, Windows, Linux, Virtualization, Home, Lab, HomeLab

Id: usSGG5lkBfw

Length: 7min 24sec (444 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 12 2018