My Homelab Experience Part 1: My HPE ProLiant Hardware
A while ago I wanted to see how much computing power I could get out of a small pile of cash I had- specifically $150. I looked on eBay to look for salvaged server components that were decommissioned from datacenters and ended up on eBay, possibly for a multitude of reasons. Some were too power-hungry- as some of these rack-mounted solutions that I was considering were from 2009, and the definition of power efficient has most certainly evolved since then. I jumped from different sockets- mostly looking at Intel sockets- from 771 to 1366 to 775 to 1356, all until it led me to the HP ProLiant DL360p– a rack-mounted server using the LGA 2011 socket from 2014.
I had found my sweet spot- they weren’t so old that the chips were uncompetitive in more modern times, but they were cheap enough that they were pretty powerful for the amount of money spent. Eventually, I picked up one for around $110 from eBay. This package included a single Intel Xeon E5-2630 v2, a hexacore processor with hyperthreading, 16 gigabytes of registered ECC RAM, and two power supplies for redundancy. It didn’t come with any hard drives, or any caddies, although since I wasn’t running this in a datacenter and therefore did not have to have to put the hard drive where the caddy was, this was not a problem.
On a USB flash storage device, I installed Kubuntu v18.04 LTS, which worked like a charm. Later, I am planning to install Windows 10 onto the hard drive on top of some hypervisor, as my hardware doesn’t support that operating system.
I will continue to look tinker with my hardware and try to make the best use of it. More posts will be coming soon when I play with it more. Until later!