Supermicro Server - Cheap and Powerful Home Virtual Server II

2021 is finally here rich and you know what that means what does that mean john it is time to get some upgrades for our home lab yes sir [Applause] move over big boy welcome super boy you get it john it's a super micro server [Music] in august 2019 we introduced big boy to you as our new platform for our virtual infrastructure that run our channel big boy currently runs all the virtual machines we use to store make and upload videos to youtube we have a virtual machine for the firewall to protect our network a virtual machine for shipping data between the studio where we shoot the video then to my place where the editing is done our dell precision t7600 has been a dedicated and reliable workhorse the entire time but sadly it's time to move up and on our two xeon e5 2680 cpus are reaching the end of their effective support lifespan for vmware esxi and it's time to upgrade so new year and new gear it is time to upgrade the physical infrastructure with the new four post rack along with our new host but before we get through what we're going to replace big boy with let's talk about our requirements again to best plan out the hardware choice we need to start with defining our needs first our new host needs to have enough cpu ram and disk storage to run upwards of 20 or more vms containers and more and have future space for adding cards next we need to be able to take advantage of older components we already own this includes compatible ssds and mechanical hard disks including some of the storage devices from big boy third the hardware inside must have some future proofing left in it because vmware is our virtualization platform of choice we want to make sure that the products inside will be supported for at least a few versions released in the future and last it needs to be reasonably quiet big boy was a massive improvement over the previous host we had and would like to continue that moving forward okay john should we show what we chose for our base chassis let's do it scouring over ebay we decided it was time to go back to a rack server over our workstation form factor after searching we came across a super micro csc829u x10dru with 12 3.5 inch drives up front this beast packs 14 core e5 2680 v4 cpus running at 2.4 gigahertz the fact that this box has 28 total cores means we'll have plenty of space compute in this beast for years to come this server also includes four dedicated 10 gigabit based tnix a dedicated integrated lifestyle interface and enough ram and pcie slots for our needs delivered to our door the host cost us a cool 619 usd worth every penny all that power outside hover this server is a bare bones chassis so outside of those badass cpus bare 3.5 inch drive trays and dual 800 watt power supplies we are still lacking ram storage and a storage controller for our future disks so our next task was to secure our storage and storage controller so back to ebay we went to find a 12 gigabit sas capable raid car to handle the 12 base sas cage up front we settled on a dell h731 gigabyte 12 gigabits a second pci express raid controller having worked on many adele r730 hosts in the past i knew this card was the right fit for our server and with its one gigabyte battery packed right back cash i know it'll serve us well we picked up this card for 155 dollars which is a pricey piece of gear but very much worth it it was a compromise between this card and the two gigabyte cash card version for 100 more and that felt too steep for us for this build for large capacity we're using a few mechanical hard disks we've had lying around the studio we'll be using a pair of six terabyte enterprise sas disks a pair of 14 terabyte western digital drives we picked up for an absolute steal on black friday from best buy and a pair of samsung 861 terabyte evo sata ssds in addition to the traditional sata sas disks i also wanted super fast nvme storage for the vms that require the fastest access to disks so i headed to amazon to pick up a glow trends m.2 pci express nvme adapter card and a samsung evo 971 terabyte nvme ssd the adapter card was 13 bucks and the ssd was 130. the nvme is natively supported by esxi and will act as our tier 1 storage on to ram unfortunately since the cpus are modern we're out of luck on using our old ddr3 ecc memory that currently resides in big boy so once again we headed back to the ebays for some ram this time we settled on four sticks of samsung's 16 gigabyte ecc pc4 2133p ddr4 memory for a grand total of 64 gigabytes this server has room for an absolutely absurd amount of ram and the four sticks we purchased look anemic inside this host but on the flip side we have plenty of room to add ram in the future as our needs increase and the cost of ecc ddr4 drops down four sticks cost us 160 usd okay let's get all of that gear into this host and get it booted up you ready john let's do it [Music] [Applause] [Music] if you remember from earlier one of our big requirements was that this system needed to be as quiet as possible being as this is a server and not a workstation like big boy we need to do something about the noise as rack servers always have high rpm fans we reached out to our friends at noctua and they were kind enough to send us four 80 millimeter nf a8 pwm fans these awesome little fans have a max rpm of 2200 which isn't the same max speed as the fans already in the server now but they will do just fine and most importantly they're going to be so much more quiet but obviously this case wasn't designed to fit a standard 80 millimeter fan so off the tinkercad where we're gonna design a mount to allow us to fit the standard 80mm into the space as one of these larger knee decks that came with it let's get to it here's the simple design i came up with to mount the 80 millimeter fans into this super micro 2u case this mount will work with any standard 80mm fans and we've put a link in the description to download the stl if you're looking to swap out your loud fans for something else instead now let's print these up and install them into our server [Music] [Music] now it's time to fire up the system make sure everything is healthy functional and begin installing the esxi hypervisor we'll be installing es6i onto a bootable usb stick that plugs directly into a port on the motherboard you can download the esxi hypervisor for free from vmware just create an account and download esxi we'll put a link in the description below where you can get a copy of it our host doesn't have a cd-rom drive so we're gonna use a tool called rufus to write the iso to a bootable usb to install esxi onto our internal usb stick inside the host now we insert our target disk into the internal usb port on the host insert the install usb stick in the back start the host up and boot off the install usb stick and begin installing esxi we'll just follow the prompts of the installation and target the internal usb stick as our installation location once the installation is completed reboot the host and you're ready to get working with your vms once you reboot the system set the root password and get it on our lan then we'll set up our data stores as we defined and move our running vms from our old host to the new one now that everything is up and running we need to build our four post server rack and get the server racked up cabled and ready to go [Music] so [Music] and that legend was going to do it for our video today john and i generally hope you enjoyed watching as much as we enjoyed making it and we'd love don't you think the video did we miss out anything do you want to see more do you want to see what we do with this thing get down those comments and let us know if this is the first time you've seen us please consider subscribing because it really helps us out and keeps us making these videos we got a website right here we put all the results for our testing of our other videos fans and whatnot go there obviously no testing on this one we have a twitter and instagram so go there and follow us last but not least we have a discord server we'd love to have you join talk about servers talk about computers fans heatsinks whatever you want we'd love to talk with you so consider joining us thank you for watching and we will see you again soon [Music] you

Channel: 2GuysTek

Views: 51,393

Keywords: homelab, supermicro, supermicro server build, home lab setup, home lab tour, home lab server, home lab server build, supermicro nvme, homelab server, homelab setup, homelab 2021, home lab 2021, home lab virtualization server, cheap home lab server, diy home lab server, home lab server rack, best home lab server, Home lab

Id: rbTx0-ZjXGE

Length: 9min 47sec (587 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 10 2021