My HUGE (but small) 1U Server Upgrade

i've been on a quest to find a few one-use servers that will replace my two and three u servers these servers will have to be powerful enough to drive all of my virtual machines that run all my workloads and at the same time it needs to give me a little more redundancy than i have now my current servers use a total of 5u and if i can pull this off i can regain some precious rack space so i think i might have found the perfect 1u server and hopefully by the end of this video i'll have one you over two so dumb and so dumb [Music] before we get started a huge thank you to well all of you and thank you for the likes and comments ahead of time because it really helps algorithm but a sincere thank you for helping to make this channel what it is today and a huge thank you for joining my live stream if you'd like to check that out i stream every tuesday thursday and saturday on twitch i spend a lot of time answering a lot of your questions so if you have a question about any of my videos i'd love for you to join so thank you again and let's get into it so let's talk about my one new servers over the last year i've been making great use of a couple of my servers but my virtualization workhorse has been my dell r710 this server along with another one drive a lot of my tutorials and a lot of services that you see in my videos and some that you don't see and while this server has worked great i felt like i needed something a little more modern a little more efficient and get some redundancy at the same time and over the last few weeks i've been trying to create a more robust solution than just one big server and at the same time i've been trying to consolidate some space on my rack this led me down the path of trying to find the perfect 1u server i even asked for your help on a live stream in those streams we talked about some of the different solutions some of the possibilities and even some of the challenges that we'd face with the 1u server this led into conversations about ddr3 versus ddr4 onboard gpu versus discrete gpu onboard ipmi multiple servers versus one big powerful server a custom build server versus a bare bone server ssd versus mechanical sata vs sas drives fan speed and noise and even the dreaded amd versus intel conversation now this was a fantastic experience it allowed me to lean into you and the collective knowledge of the whole entire community so that i could tap into a full stack of knowledge so i sincerely appreciate your engagement and your feedback and so i've had a lot of deciding to do over the last couple of weeks while i could get a bigger rack i'd like to make better use of the rack that i have so i set out to build a 1u server and so what did i end up settling on i ended up picking up a super micro super server 5018 r m bare bone server this is a 1u rack mountable system that has an lga 2011 v3 socket it only has one socket but we'll get into that later it supports many different intel xeon e5 2600 processors either the v3 or v4 but you'll see my choice later has the intel c612 chipset and it has four three and a half inch hot swappable base and it supports up to one terabyte of ecc ddr4 2400 megahertz ram and it has eight slots to fill it has six usb ports and it comes with a 350 watt power supply and there are also a few other extras that i didn't expect but enough talking about the specs let's open it up and take a look so what's in the box upon opening the box the first thing that i saw it came with was rails this was a huge plus this just saved me fifty to sixty dollars from buying rack rails that are only half as useful so super happy about that so we have lots of additional parts and here's the passive cpu cooler and then there's the server of course and this is what they call a bare bone server but it's actually pretty full featured so after opening the server up the first thing you see is this fan shroud now this seems kind of flimsy but it is what it is it helps force the air over the cpu cooler i guess as long as it keeps the cpu cool i'm cool with that so now let's install the cpu and what cpu did i go with i went with the intel xeon e5 2680 v4 this thing is pretty sweet it has 14 cores and 28 threads it's clocked at 2.4 gigahertz but can turbo up to 3.3 and it has 35 megs of cash and i've been thinking about underclocking the cpu a little bit but we'll see if my workloads can handle it and i also think that this cpu supports gvt-g where i can pass through the gpu to multiple virtual machines which could make for very interesting virtual machines or even plex transcoding but more on that later so next up was my ram choice i ended up going with the samsung 32 gig dimms now these dimms are ddr4 they're registered so ecc they're clocked at 2 400 megahertz and i chose 32 gig dimms so i picked up a total of 256 gigs but you'll see why i only installed 128 gigs here so after installing the ram next up was installing hard drives so the first drive might be a little unexpected i chose for the os drive a sata dom that's because i didn't go with the traditional ssd for my os drive nor did i go with the typical usb drive i ended up choosing a super micro cedar dom for the os drive these sata doms are pretty awesome and it was my first time using or seen one in person but this satadom is a small sata3 flash memory module it's more reliable and faster than usb and this one doesn't require external power and you can tell which ports to plug this into because they're yellow and it did come with a power adapter just in case but this will run the operating system for my server and ultimately i decided to go with this because it saves some space it's fast it's reliable it uses less power than an ssd and i really didn't have the space to install an ssd within the chassis and these drives can read up to 520 megabytes per second and right at 95 megabytes per second now it's not going to win any performance tests but i thought it was a good choice for my servers next up is the cooling system within the server or just the fans now it did come with four operational fans and the two on the left are just dummy fans which did kind of throw me off and these fans when they start up are pretty loud like most servers but after the system posts it's actually surprisingly quiet so the next thing you'll probably notice is a pci express slot so here's one of the downsides of having a 1u server i only get one functioning pci express slot and i have to use it with this riser the way that this works is that this riser ends up blocking all of the other pci express slots due to the height of the one use server and so this riser prevents other devices being plugged in using traditional methods and while i'd love to have two pci express slots i didn't want to have to have another 2u server and maybe there's a creative way i can figure out to use another one in the future so let's take a look at the back and here's the i o ports so we have a single power supply a serial connection i'll probably never use we have ipmi on the back here which is fantastic we have lots of usb ports 2.0 and 3.0 and we have dual gigabit knicks back here which opens up some interesting possibilities for nick teaming or bonding and we have a vga port which is nice but i'll be using ipmi after the initial setup and here you can see the one lonely pci express slot next we're going to install all of my drives so we have four hot swappable dry base all with quick release they feel pretty cheap but they get the job done and it comes with these dummy drives that you'll have to take out and i decided to fill these with four one terabyte samsung evo ssd drives which are pretty cheap right now i went with consumer grade because they're a lot cheaper i get a five year warranty and i'm comfortable with the redundancy that will be built into my raid which will be coming soon and after installing these i ran into my first challenge i bought and installed the wrong trays for this ssd after installing the drives and lining them up they didn't align with the backplane which totally makes sense but i wasn't thinking about that when i was buying my adapters so i ended up finding these three and a half to two and a half drive bay converters which worked out nicely it positions the connectors in the same spot they would be on a typical drive and they're made of metal rather than plastic so they won't soak up heat and so after doing that my ssds aligned with the backplane oh and don't forget to put the stickers on and take note of your serial number once i had all four drives in their converters and then in their sleds i could slide them right in oh and totally random i picked up an additional cpu because i heard that some of the boards don't come pre-flashed with v4 support so this is a 2620 v3 it's super cheap and really nice i figured for less than 20 bucks it was a nice insurance policy just in case i needed to flash the boards for v4 support plus it gives me an excuse to build another server maybe no yeah maybe yeah so back to the fans in the pci express device i ended up picking up a few more fans albeit heavier duty ones due to my mistake when ordering but they worked out just nicely replacing the dummy fans was super easy i just swapped out the rubber feet and put them in place that's when i realized i didn't have enough fan pins there's only one available fan pin towards the front of the chassis there's another one up by the cpu but i didn't have extensions on hand and i decided i'm not going to use it so i zip tied them down and we were ready to go then i decided to install my pci express device i went with the nvidia quadro p2200 i went with this device for some stream encoding batch conversion of videos and even some flex transcoding this is a true 1u slot with two this was important to me since i didn't have much room after trying to install it i realized that the sata dom was in the way luckily they provide two sata powered ports and it was a tight fit but i got it working and this was another reason why i got more fans because i wanted to push out all the hot air and keep the components in this area cool and after messing with this for about 10 minutes i finally got that satisfying pop when it snapped into place then i powered it up to make sure it was all working and now it's good to go now let's close it all up and it's time to fire it up and the first boot worked without a hitch it recognized the cpu recognized all of the ram and was operating in safe temperatures i burned in and tested the memory ahead of time because those issues are hard to track down later oh yeah and in case you couldn't tell by all the hints i ended up buying two i'll have two 1u servers to add some redundancy to some of my services this will allow me to run a proxmox cluster and possibly some ha with kubernetes which is a lot more robust than what i have now and so with these two servers in hand let's go install these servers this time i decided to change the rgb lighting for this upgrade and as everyone knows green rgb gives you better energy efficiency and purple rgb gives you less errors i thought this was fitting since i'm going to decommission some of my older less efficient servers and also i'm using ecc registered ram so hopefully that will give me less errors so here's where i'm going to put these new servers right below my networking equipment and as you can see i don't have much space left so i'm trying to make the best of it and here are the two servers that i plan on decommissioning the one on top is the one that i call photon this is my secondary approximax server that only runs one workload right now it's running a 24 7 streaming code for one of my twitch channels and this will be repurposed in a future video the one on the bottom is the one that i call galaxy this has been my primary workhorse for all of my virtualization as well as my kubernetes workloads it's also running truenas virtualized and is attached to my disk array below so now there's only one thing left to do and it's installed these servers first up was installing the rails now it's been a while since i've installed rails and the last true rails i installed were tool-less but these worked out great again super happy that these were included with the server i thought for sure i was going to have to buy some other hardware and after getting the rails in all i had to do was line up the new server and slide it in oh i forgot to peel off the production installing the second one was just as easy as the first you just put together the rails install the rails on each side and screw them in i ran out of cage nuts during this install so i ended up ordering some more so when i install my new device above these two i'll have to remember to install these cage nuts too hopefully then i just slid in the next one and it went perfect the next peel didn't peel so well oh well and i forgot to put the drive labels on the second one so i put those on note to self write down all the serial numbers before you put these servers into use and now all i had to do was plug these in i thought this was going to be the easy part but i didn't have enough ports on my ups and the plugs are way up in the front so i ended up unplugging the second power supply on my disk shelf and my r710 temporarily my next step was installing the network cables i ended up getting some more cat6 cables and running them to my patch panel and binding them up with the rest of the cables i needed two cables for each server one for the primary network card and one for the ipmi nic i may actually end up using the second nic for some teaming or bonding but i'm running out of ports really fast once plugging that in you can see the ipmi lights turning on so that's a good sign and now let's fire up these servers you can see right away that the nic one light turns on and then shortly after that you can see the satadom hard drive activity flashes and then all eight ssd activity lights flash that's pretty awesome and so what's next up for these servers i dropped some hints but in case you didn't catch them these are going to be my new virtualization servers to drive everything that my previous two were running also i'd like to cluster these two servers so that i can move things around a little bit more easier than i can now and i have some plans for the old server so be sure you're subscribed to see what's next and so that's what i've been working on the last couple of weeks two big server builds and so what do you think of my server builds do you think i make good choices do you think one 1u form factor is worth the trade-offs do you have any one used servers if so let me know in the comment section below and if you have more questions comments or concerns you can absolutely ask them in my live stream which is every tuesday thursday and saturday i'd love for you to join and again thank you so much for helping to make this channel what it is today couldn't have done it without you and as always stream on my friends scorpio my gosh i think you guys are gonna crash my bot too i love it hopefully my bot hangs in there uh his that code is uh mediocre at best we'll see dude p diddy 10 gifted so oh my gosh man i can't even say hello man how's it going um man dude thank you so much dude pd really man gorfy too you guys really don't have to but i really appreciate it thank you so much um jay

Channel: Techno Tim

Views: 116,103

Keywords: 1u server build, 1u, server, homelab, home lab, supermicro, super micro, SuperServer, 5018r-m, 1u server rack, 1u server noise, 1u server case, techno tim, proxmox, 1u server rails, 1u server gpu, nvidia, quadro, p2200, p2000, E5-2680v4, e5-2680, E5-2620V3, e5-2620, E5-2680 v4, sata dom, server upgrade, 2020, 2021, server rgb, efficient, ecc, registered ram, homelab ideas, proxmox cluster

Id: CMu5gsWKc9Y

Length: 17min 16sec (1036 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 21 2020