Dell R720XD Lab Server From Tech Supply Direct Review

let's talk about servers specifically this Dell our 720 X d there are a lot of companies that live on the bleeding edge which means they change out their servers rather quickly and before they're technically you know end-of-life but that's obviously a matter of opinion if you need the fastest best servers all the time you're willing to swap them out even on a yearly basis and I've seen this in the financial markets especially where every tiny millisecond can make a lot of money for them therefore swapping out servers becomes worth it because they need the absolute leading edge all the time that opens up the secondary market to a lot of great deals on used servers and the folks at Tech supply direct someone we've done some business with decided hey they'd like to sponsor our channel so they made an offer code and so by using the offer code you can get 10% off your purchase with text apply direct helps a channel out helps you out by getting you a 10% discount and they have a lot of options on servers specifically when we're gonna talk about today is this Dell our 720 and I'm making this video also because I'm going to do a series of videos both on freelance and xcp and G using this particular server so whenever someone asked what server did you do this on I will just be linking back to this video so let's go over the details specs of the server and a couple other things but first can you hit the like button because in our algorithm driven world that helps the YouTube algorithm know that other people should watch this video and that you enjoyed it and it's a good indicator for the system that drives us anyways let's take a look and talk about the specs and dig into the details of this hardware so I already have the lid off but let's remove the airflow plenum here and get that out of the way to expose the details of this particular server now this server actually will support up to seven hundred and sixty eight gigs of ram so we don't even have it all filled up but it is currently has 64 gigs of ECC memory which I know make some people happy because I'm going to do some free dance videos on it and a big ECC argument it's moot point on us because well the server's pretty much all come with ECC we have the Intel 526 70 at 2.6 gigahertz we have two of these then we have the Dell perk h3 10 mini now if you're not familiar with these the h3 ten min of the raid expansion because this support is currently in its configuration it's a 12 drive setup on this system so this will support all 12 drives but you can also get this server configured in a I believe it's a 24 Drive two and a half inch versus the twelve three-and-a-half inch drives which is what we have right now but this is an IT mode and we'll cover that in a second but that is IT mode for passing through the drive to the operating system you can swap these modules out or when you order it you can get a different mode such as this module here so this is actually a specific raid controller for hardware RAID and I'm gonna do separate videos on some of that but essentially if you want to have the Dell system or this card here control the raid you would go with something else if you want the operating system which is what we wanted for this particular series of videos on to do first you want the h3 10 in IT mode because that means pass all the drives to the operating system versus a RAID controller takes all the drives groups them together in whichever configuration want and passes them through as a single hard drive or you can build multiple raid arrays in each raid array you build passes you as a single hard drive so you're basically removing it from the operating systems responsibility for raid that's the difference between IT mode and getting an actual raid card inside of here the other advantage some of these raid cards have is they do have things like extra memory chips actually I think it's on this side moves a battery off yep some memory chips on different controllers and I'll do a separate video where I cover some of these in more depth like I said but basically this has memory on it has all the raid settings on it which is what this hanging off here is the battery to hold the raid settings on there and you're using Hardware rate you do not want this if you plan to use things like FreeNAS and ZFS you want FreeNAS to have direct control therefore we're going to leave in the h3 10 in IT mode and look like so it will cover the settings when we get to the hardware software details of this server but that's obviously just something important to think about when you're ordering it or if you're ever buying one of these making sure you have the right mode settings on there and then the back plank nectar doesn't change it's actually kind of cool because you just swap out this little card pops out you pop the other one in and that will change the functionality the system the fans are modular which is really cool and now this goes back to why would I ever want to buy a used server well it doesn't have some dust and the fans and things like that well Tex apply direct cleans it up really nice for you but this is the other advantage of a server that there's a plenty of in the market buy a spare one of these not when it goes bad before it goes bad fans do occasionally go bad it's rare but not completely unheard of and depending on I should say depending on the dust levels in your environment generally I don't see that many fans going bad and servers but it's really handy because you can find these cheap even on eBay and keep a spare and set it on top of the server make sure it's a working spare and that way if you ever have a fan alert you don't have to wait a couple days for shipping a lot of things inside of here is you notice we have some SATA modules over here and we have a couple spots to put SATA drives right here I don't have any in here in this particular config you can get a little pigtail to power the SATA drives but you can put a pair of SSDs back here if you want and I say a pair of them because maybe you want to set things up in RAID mode and that's a pretty cool option to be able to have these drives inside as your boot device and then all the drives in front that are under here for the rest of the system for your running all your data but instead what we've done is it does have an internal USB and yes that's just a SAN disk and if you're wondering what the thing is on the back I'll slide it out real quick we write XC PNG because that's what we loaded on this and you load it and we use this as the main drive so we put it in outer USB to load this loaded XC PNG and we leave it inside here yes I know it's not redundant it's a single one but for demo purposes and for all the lab videos we're going to do that's great if you wanted something a little better you would get the modules and pop in a couple SSDs back here and obviously that would be your nice way to do this by the way and I say back here the SSDs actually slide out this way and back in so if you got this with the SSDs and put them in the back they shot on the back of the server and kind of rack in like that and you would have the connectors right here with the whole system for that but other than that inside is pretty nice if you didn't know things that are orange generally in Dell that's been their color scheme for a while can actually be remove without powering off or restarting the server things that are blue you want to have the server off to remove which is means we can actually leave this all hooked up and set up and if we have to change a fan out pop the lid off without having any downtime pop that new fan in but if you ever wanted to break the system apart more there are levers right here that you can pull this entire array out if you want it will slide all of this up and out but that's pretty cool now the other module part about this is back here we happen to have one two three four network cards in this so will four network spice and let's cover and show what those look like at the back of the server over here so on the back of the server we have two spots for SFP+ and then two rj45 standard one gig connectors here's another view of how those vac modules will come in and out so that means I can plug in a 10 gig right here and then my standard rj45 s are going to go here for standard one gig connectivity so this could go to a storage controller or just a 10 gig switch if we had it now that supports SFP or we can use our standard rj45 s now all the way over here on the other side is our idrac connector and what the ID rec is is kind of an lights-out management system specific to Dell and when we go to these other side of the so we start looking at how the I'd react works and how you interact with the system you get a better idea how that functions but it's actually really nice then we have these dual 750 watt power supplies that are modular and redundant and can be pulled out notice the orange tabs while the system is live so if you have a power supply failure the system can notify you and then you can swap out a power spot this is also something when we put these in for clients we go ahead and buy an extra power supply and leave it you know within their IT room so extra fan extra power supply that way if one goes bad I don't have to listen to a complaint about a bad power supply you have one on hand just to swap it out so let's take a look at the front of the system here and we let's pop a drive out randomly slide it out you said this has a 12 three-and-a-half inch base on their SAS connectors are on these these are wood we have some three terabyte drives I think yeah we have a handful three terabyte drives in here that are gonna be for storage and doing some of our pass-through and me watching through the reflection in the camera you can still slide these in and out they're pretty simple if you want to adapt these and we stuck a couple SSDs in for some other demos we're going to be doing we just stuck in one of these little plastic adapters maybe that's what I'm looking for so we can pop an SSD in here and slide it right in now the system does have in the back here and I didn't it maybe didn't cover them in detail but it does have a few PCIe slots so if you want to put some other devices in with the power adapter you do need to pigtail power adapter for it as well that that is right here in the back so you can pop up a couple different cards in now the next question people ask is how loud is this thing not quiet we're gonna s what we're gonna be finishing any other room but while it's sitting here I'm gonna plug it in so you can hear just how loud this is so when you first plug it in there is a little bit of a hum basically right now the I direct system is booting up because like I said there is a lights out so to speak management so you can manage this with only making this much noise because it hasn't really powered off the motherboard and booting up the I direct system so I can then take control of it which is we're gonna go to next but let's go ahead and turn it on and here the full noise of this thing now it takes a second before it idles down and once the system idles down and it's not doing as much it'll quiet down so they are variable-speed on here far as I know that is the out-of-the-box default setting setting as we got them I haven't really adjusted them there are some adjustments for like how much you want to rev up the fans but generally I want them revving up if the server's under heavy load but it's not unreasonably loud but it is probably a little louder than maybe you want sitting next to you while you're doing a video but it's not a super annoying sound to me but it's still not going to be whisper quiet that's that's just not these systems here alright so let's go and dive into it and look at the eye direction now all right we have the server booted up and ready to go here so let's go ahead and log in as root and the default password if you didn't know for most ID wrecks or at least all the ones I've seen it was always been Kelvin you do want to make sure you change it it'll prompt you to do so I've already changed that password from the default CA lvan for those of you wondering and we are now into the idrac system now the Adric system is a separate integrated dell remote access controllers to the version 7 enterprise version that is the system to monitor the system this is like that lights-out management and on the summary page here you can go ahead and we'll do this first we'll launch and see that systems booted up and this is actually showing what the system's displaying so I have full control as if I'm sitting at the console on this and we can reboot shut down the server power it off in all those functions from here we can also inside of here we can go to power on and off and actually forcibly power the server on and off because the dell idrac system is a separate controller if you have problems with the server even with the hardware the ID rec is able to without the server being so to speak booted up or running able to do things like turn the server on and off and show you what's on the council and even get into the bios and change settings on here it's really nice because you don't really need to plug a monitor or anything into this to set these servers up just figure out what the idrac IP address is for me I set everything to DHCP and then statically map based on the MAC address so I know it gets the same IP and usually you want to set up a separate management network for all your idrac controllers and when you build out a whole rack with these you'll build out a whole lights out so to speak side of the controller out of your network so all the controllers are plugged in there and you can physically get into each server even when you're not physically next to that server good one you want to figure out what's going on if a part goes bad let's go ahead and shut this down so let's actually we're going to reboot it yes and go ahead and restart xcp in Jena what I want to do is show you the IT mode because we have all the drys passed through to the operating system with the h3 10 controller and that's what we're going to be showing here is exactly how that gets configured and it's pretty simple so right now the server is whirring up his fans and making all of its noise but it's in the other room so it's not bothering me at all or affecting the video and we'll wait a second here to get to the screen now here's we can go into the system setup or the BIOS boot manager but we actually want to get into the raid config with the control R and it says no configuration present because there's not one we've passed all we've created no disk groups no virtual disks we'd done all physical disks and we need to go hit ctrl n here but if I ctrl n it spawns a new window in Chrome so we'll just do it with a virtual keyboard here and this is where you would set each Drive and this is where you can mix and match so we're gonna go to f2 for operations convert to raid compatible what I did was convert it to non raid that's why it says that here so each Drive can be converted either way so here's the for SSDs we have that are as standard SATA and it shows you the connector type is SATA vs. SAS these are the Toshiba SAS drives that are in here in once again we can convert each one of these to rate or non-raid also you may notice with the SAS ones I can force LED blinking so I can figure out what drive is in which Bay but with the SATA ones that's not an option on there so that's all I had to do to get this switched over not a big deal with the h3 10 I don't believe this option is available on some of the other ones like the 7 Series controller I believe does not allow pass-through which is why you want to use the h3 10 with IT mode and we're using currently the bios and it's version 3.0 on this particular controller alright we're gonna go ahead and escape out of here and let it boot up press control alt delete' to reboot so easy enough go here to console controllers just hit apply for sure reboot and it's gonna go through its regular boot up process while we're doing that you can see real quick while that's running through here is the general the way it looks in a way we launched a console is html5 in case you're familiar with the older versions that you cringe cuz it's like that old Java that I really hated where you had to use some weird Java thing and yeah it was always a pain before to set these up this is at least more modern in ER 720 this is the access controller seven and it uses html5 for the Virtual Console but because this is a full management system it does have the option to set up alerts give you a lot of information about the hardware but those alerts can even be from email as in if a hardware major hardware failure happens with your system you can have this because it's on a separate controller unrelated to the operating system it will go through and alert you that something has happened to the server as part of the lights-out management that's why it runs independent of the actual operating system the address system is an operating system into itself but it gives you all the details all the hardware statuses of everything power status CPU memory so you can look up not just what's in the machine but the health of those things if there's any type of problems with it or there's some type of issues going on but all those little details are completely available through the idrac which is really nice you you can also take a look at the physical disks in the idrac so it'll give you all the detailed information about each physical disk if you have built this using the virtual disk as you've built us with the park controller in RAID mode then it will give you the status of the RAID controller because then the operating system is blind to what's going on with every controller and you can see it directly from inside of here so you can control replacing drives and everything else managed create build unbuilt the only thing I don't think was possible in here double check I think you have to go into that bios option to set these in non raid both their statuses non raid mode here okay just have convert to raid but I don't think you let me unconverted that's why I had to go into BIOS do that I can't remember and because I've already got these disks set up already in the system I didn't want to I don't want to retry that but it does show the if you have more than one controller even you'll be able to go on here and do that also if you're using it in RAID mode and letting this handle the raid the parkin shorthand of the raid you can configure hot spares for example and what that allow you to do is have a spare on the ready to drop in if there's a raid failure kind of making the ease of management there for you so if you wanted to let that if you wanted to let the whole system handle it all for you that absolutely is possible and in some circumstances you may want the system to do it because you don't want to deal with configuring the raid in XC PNG or whatever other operating system you're putting on there you can have it just create one big raid array load the operating system to it i burning system sees one hard drive treats it as a single hard drive but it's actually a group of hard drives being managed by the per controller which you know that can be advantageous power monitoring this is a cool feature because you can check the health you can see exactly how many watts that's using what percentage of capacity that is it will even track it over time so because we rebooted it we shut it down for a second so here is our low power which is no watts here's our spinning up all the fans at about 270 watts and then we're idling currently with the dual power supplies at 896 watts this thing will also track over time how many kilowatt hours that it may be using that is a really good thing if you go in just how much does this cost well you look up here what you pay per watch what you pay per kilowatt hour from your electrical company and from there you can then calculate out exactly how much this will cost to operate so that's obviously a question that a lot of people have is if I build this home lab just how much power does this need so sitting here idling like I said about 196 watts but that's going to go up and ramp up as you add load to the system or as you add more things for it to do and it scales so the wattage will go up and it will peak out it has a warning once it hits about 900 watts with failure threshold being at night and Ernie watch like I said they do sell that bigger power supply if you wanted to go more than 750 but that's pretty much it for a good overview of the server like I said it's a great server I'll be doing a lot of videos on it for both XE PG and FreeNAS and when people ask for server me use them and talk about this one from text apply direct they were gracious enough to supply this and they do have that offer code so you can get your 10% off and if your nursin purchasing this dell 12 g PowerEdge are 720 XD with the 12 BAE like we have configured here I basically ran through the same configuration so it's about 2 grand for this system that would be with the 2x Intel Xeon 2670 s 64 gig ram the H 310 no extra backplane and 12 3 terabyte SAS drives that's actually nice they have all the cost broken down here and if you chose to do just SATA drives which is an option they actually shipped to me with 12 SAS drives and I put in a couple SSDs or something back and forth for doing some testing but you can see that it's actually almost a thousand of the price so if you were to buy the hard dry separate yes you can get this with no hard drives in it choose it as an option and back a thousand dollars off and just get the chassis and start sticking your own drives in or maybe you have your own drives put in but that's it go ahead and use our offer code to get 10% off your order and fill it all out oh I Drive enterprise versus the I Drive express those are both options the I Drive Enterprise does cost a bit more but they have that on the spec sheet here on Dells website you can read about the differences between the Express connector versus the enterprise connector I will leave that because that question does come up about hey my hydrect doesn't look like yours so I want to all make sure I leave that link here in the description all right thanks thanks for watching if you like this video give it a thumbs up if you want to subscribe to this channel to see more content hit that subscribe button and Abell like on and maybe YouTube will sense you and notice when we post if you want to hire us for a project that you've seen or discussed in this video head over to Lauren systems comm where we offer both business IT services and consulting services and are excited to help you with whatever project you want to throw at us also if you want to carry on the discussion further ahead over to forums at Loren systems comm where we can keep the conversation going and if you want to help the channel out in other ways we offer affiliate links below which offer discounts for you and a small cut for us that does help fund this channel and once again thanks again for watching this video and see you next time

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 77,292

Keywords: Dell R720XD, dell r720xd noise, dell r720xd rear backplane, dell r720xd sd card, dell r720xd backplane, dell r720xd memory configuration, dell r720xd flex bay, dell, poweredge, server, r720xd, dell r720xd internal usb, virtual lab

Id: SiItPsanrxo

Length: 22min 2sec (1322 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2019