Dell R720XD Lab Server From Tech Supply Direct Review
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The battery isn't to hold the RAID settings, it's for power failure to hold the data in the RAID memory so it's not lost, and then it writes the data to the drive array on power resume.
These Dell R720/R620 servers could be the best option for starting to dive in and are MUCH better options to start with than ie more popular R710!
I've bought 2 unused, cold-spare R620's and let me explain what you can do with them:
- In 2019 you want to use NVMe as much as possible and these C602 chipsets CAN boot from Intel 750 and Intel Optane 900p in UEFI mode (and I would bet they can boot from Intel's DC NVMe like P3700, P3610 etc, but can not from Samsung 960 EVO - that one can be only used as data drive, L2ARC...).
You'll want RISERS - R620 has 3 additional PCIe slots while R720 has 7! It's a different world working on NVMe that on any old HDD's or even SSD's.
The fact that it boots from those drives makes everything much faster.
- Also - with R720 there are options to insert GPU cards and play with GPU passtrough to ie PLEX in Ubuntu LXC.
- DDR3 RAM is good, it's ECC and it's cheap. And these machines can take a lot of cheap 4GB or 8GB in their 4 memory channels per socket layout and you'll want a lot of RAM - it's a very cheap way of growth while in many other places with DDR4 not so much.
- H310 raid card can be used for software RAID (Proxmox ZFS recognized the drives without any issues as card was put into "IT mode"). But it's crippled IT mode! (queue depth is limited to 25 which is really bad. You can read about it here www.yellow-bricks.com/2014/04/17/disk-controller-features-and-queue-depth/
Lucky for those reading this now in summer of 2019 - after years of bricking H310 mini's now a working flashing process is available.
www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/bkxszi/flashing_the_h310_mono_mini_to_it_mode/ (look for PDF link with instructions - I'm not an expert in flashing card, but have managed to flash mine and it went from ZFS 4xHDD RAID-10 that gave 80-90MB/s to easily 250+MB/s in RAID 5/RAIDZ1 on 6 drives. Same drives, same server.
But beware - if you brick it, your server is done until you get a replacement.
So if you do not want to risk it - and reward a guy who started the movement with Dell owners - buy it already flashed on eBay for peanuts from the guy that inflicted enthusiasm into the community. He deserves it!
www.ebay.com/itm/Dell-H310-mini-monolithic-K09CJ-with-LSI-9211-8i-P20-IT-Mode-ZFS-FreeNAS-unRAID/163672512791
- I found that limit of H310 2y ago and since this flashing was not known at the time I decided to get a premium RAID card for these machinse - H710p (not H710!)
H710p is newer and more powerfull chipset (LSI SAS 2208) than H710 and has a free extra option to add 1 or 2 SSD's (like Samsung SM863 or Intel S3700 that are
Would you be so kind and list me some ideas that I can try out on my server? I did some stuff but can't find anything else thats kinda useful. What do you vm?
@@Runkosx3 I am a full-stack developer and a start-up owner so lots of stuff I do is based on issues we encounter with our project. It's much easier to improve when you have real case scenarios and some ral-life data so I would suggest you find something that interests you - so you will not give up easily or be satisfied too quickly when impovements could be made.
Here are couple of our projects and real case usages that benefit dearly from our playing with HW, not just SWF.
1) We run a WWW+POS web SaaS: klik-mall.com on our own private cloud. It's sort of a Shopify (for Slovenian[EU] SMB companies), created on a LAMP stack.
It started as a single server and now we run multiple LXC's on 3-4 physical servers behind Unifi Ruter & switch.
Before investing into Unifi equipment we had a virtualized pfSense in KVM on Proxmox - it worked great, it's HW was powerful so you do not have to budge trying some stuff like Snort out. But the main caveat was that we could never shut that server down as we would loose our LAN network and our app would be unaccesible to users and customers. You can make a replica of pfSense on another server and sometime at 04.00AM switch a cable from WAN to another server for minimal downtime, but that is very cool for lab, not so much for SaaS. But it can be one of your failover scenarios in a case a router dies.
A path for a user coming for our app:
WAN > Router > Switch > LXC: HAproxy (that serves as a load balancer, SSL termination... that we use to route incoming traffic based on URL, port,... to specific servers) > multiple LXC's (LAMP) - production, failover, dev/testing.
All those act as separate "machines" and have different LAN addresses.
I am not a HW or SysAdmin expert, but I try to recognize stuff that are reachable to us and can perform better.
So, recently (due to H310mini flash breaktrough) we decided to go from
APP on Optane + NAS-media files on separate Samsung NVMe
to
App (DB/PHP/cached content) on Optane and media files (PDF's, pics for webshops and websites like restavracija-mirje.si, copati.com) on ZFS.
That way they would not be using our precious and more limited Optane/NVMe storage and be able to grow much bigger. But we still wanted great performance so we used this opportunity to start our CDN on LXC with NGINX on ZFS with lots of RAM and 50GB of Optane L2ARC. NGINX is known for being faster than Apache for serving static files, so now:
- cdn.klik-mall.com/docs/documents/20/75/1457791843-uJ6b-testenine-mirje.jpg
is served from separate LXC running NGINX
- same file www.klik-mall.com/docs/documents/20/75/1457791843-uJ6b-testenine-mirje.jpg
is be served from the same container as our main App, but via Apache.
It's a 3-letter difference in URL, but a small IT science behind it.
We told our HAproxy to route traffic from URL's that contain cdn. directly to LXC-NAS with NGINX where www. in URL will go to our default LXC (for now still on Apache)
What we gain? In our quick testings NGINX TTFB is 0,7ms and Apache's is 1,7ms + we spread the load over 2 servers that run on separate physical machines + use different NIC cards so traffic does not overlap.
We have a dev/failover server with H710p HDD RAID + 2x SSDs in cache cade - it is a good option, but with flashed H310 there is a better one. Since our media usage is app. 95% read / 5% write and since some files are called very frequently while others maybe only 1-2x in their lifetime we've set up a ZFS with quite large ARC/L2ARC (Optane) that serves frequently accessed files almost instantly and reduces HDD's usage to minumum.
Result: in 80-100% we expect for media files in our app/webshop to be served to visitors as RAM/Optane, not HDD (raid).
Off coure, Cloudflare CDN is used where possible, but that is often not the case in our projects.
2) Another interesting project where we utilized HW/SWF combo is www.slovenia-trips.com
"Fast" web pages are very often cached - you are basically looking at an old version of data, it's just a question if it is obsolete or not.
Slotrips is a website for our customer that runs on PHP/CodeIgniter Framework. We put it's App on Optane and media on ZFS NAS and it runs quick. One thing required is that a part with accomodation partners www.slovenia-trips.com/eng/accomodation/pic must be displayed "randomly". That means no cache could be used where if you look/refresh browser window at a page like www.slovenia-trips.com/eng/activities the layout of activities is always the same (until cache will be flushed and a new one will be created). Since most content changes very rarely we put lots of those in full-page cache files. As that PHP app is on Optane, cached pages are served even faster than "random ones" - like a "picture" + load on server is truly minimal.
RAM in server is much more expensive/limited than 480GB-1.5TB so if you can not put it in RAM, Optane is clearly a second best option. For a 500$ Optane drive you'll open yourself up to loads of truly great options.
3) Fortnitecover.com - finalizing our newest project - for creating personalized T-Shirt designs, covers for school notebooks so kids would be a bit happier for upcoming "Back to School" time.
Here we saw better results from a WS CPU like E5-1650v4 for preparing and exporting personalized designs in PNG/JPG/PDF. That is why I mentioned if you have an option, get a 3.5GHz+ turbo CPU as some processes are single-threaded and you won't die optimizing stuff when in some cases raw power is required.
Our next test might be a Ryzen 3700x/3900x for a separate "exports" physical server.
So you can see how "creating my personalized T-Shirt design" takes an App server to present a website, an export server to create a design and a large storage server for saving all those designs. It can be 3 different physical machines, or you start with a single strong one and a hypervisor and put your processes into separated LXC/VMs. If needed, you have an option to upgrading your main server or buy another one and put a demanding process on it.
Some more home-lab cases:
Testing video editing via (10Gb ) LAN storage solutions for our screen tutorials.
We have a "time machine" backup with rsnapshot making a browseable 30-day history of some folders on windows machines etc. We basically run couple of backup options, some for on-site and some for off-site (SyncTrayzor can be a 10TB private GoogleDrive on a budget). So if you have couple of servers and different storage solutions, you can play/test stuff like this and look if files were copied/moved as planned :-)
Most of this might be boring to many, so it depends on what you do, like to do or want to learn.
But most of things mentioned above "opened up" when I started using real servers and shelled up for some RAM, state-of-art NVMe, multi-NICs... That is why I would truly recommend a R620/R720, or a Supermicro white-box - get two machines if possible (in a separate room, if possible :-)
It will speed up a learning process for a fraction of a bigger investment as some E3, Ryzen 2xxx platform.
@@studentinfomovie i just finished my 10gig lan setup and built my own nas with 24tb storage. But it is a simple raid 10 and I get 300 Mbyte when pulling something from it. I might try some of what you just suggested. Thank you!
honestly there is no reason for anyone getting into the game now to buy an r710 unless their budget absolutely forces them to. The r720 gives access to so many more basic features that are necessary today like SMTP for email and gpu support. oh and a HTML idrac that doesn't require java
@@AustinMichael Yeah, you are right - I forgot to mention that R720 iDrac will run via https on local LAN (like 192.168.2.X) and has an additional Java plugin that helps you get a virtual console (like a remote VPN or a display directly to your machine)
@Runkosx3 10Gbit network is new kind of fun :-)
We went 10Gbit the "unifi way" and it works great, but the only way I saw a true 10Gbit transfer speed was NVMe to NVMe on a direct DAC SFP+ connection between 2 Windows machines with Intel NICs - basically ur 1st test when we got the NICs. At that point a very experienced network admin was just visiting (that does network for telecoms around the world) and said to run it again so he will take oo picture of it as the transfer line from Intel 750 > Samsung 960 EVO was horizontal on 1GB/s all the way for those couple of GB files :-)
That can be a quick and quite cheap start for anybody.
What I do not see recommended enough (imho) is that RAID10 USED to be the "performance mode", but it was at the time of spinning rust drives. Even a single SATA SSD will drive circles around those setups and NVMe will run circles around both. So we utilize LXC disk on NVMe and add it a mount point for "NAS/Media" if workload requires it.
If I recall correctly, the password for iDRAC is Calvin because the Code Name at Dell for iDRAC is/was Hobbes.
Just wanted to add... the "SSD bays" in the back is part of the flex bay system. It is usually plugged into the front backplane. If for any reason you decide to use the modular controller only for the flex bay, simply purchase Dell part #0HHYJ and replace the double SFF-8087 cable with the singular SFF-8087. This way you could plug your main backplane into the HBA of your choice and the 2.5" drives into the modular RAID controller on the motherboard.
I love videos where you share your equipment specs and your recommendations! Also where to purchase such equipment. Thanks Tom! Great job. Great content.
A hint on dual power supplies, I usually connect them to different power sources, either different UPSs (each on a different circuit) or one on the rack UPS, one surge protected to a mains preferably on a different circuit than the UPS, so single UPS failure doesn't take down while system
Hey Tom, don't forget to upgrade your iDRAC/Lifecycle Controller firmware through the iDRAC controller itself. Dell changed access to their FTP server for automatic updates a while back to HTTPS only and the latest version of the iDRAC controller firmware makes it so you can use the Lifecycle Controller to check for all those firmware updates all at once. Really useful for those of us on Linux or FreeNAS! Hope that helps. Feel free to message me if you run into any snags on that. I just got done doing all 3x of my R720's here a week or two ago. Thanks for the review. LOVE these R720 servers!
That RAID card can be simply CONVERTED to IT mode. Just different firmware.
While that is true I've heard of a lot of people bricking it cause they loose certain settings in the wipe and it halts on POST
Does the H310 need to be flashed to it mode? It wasn’t clear to me in the video. It seemed to imply I just set the disk to non-raid in the console.
*slaps server* this boi can do some thicc compute
Beware the thermal limits, if you max out the drives they won’t allow the high TDP CPUs (At least not in the old web config assistant)
I like em thiccccc
The battery is not for "holding the RAID settings", it's to feed power to the RAID controller's write cache when external power fails.
Oh? So if I unplug a RAID battery, it'll retain the settings as well? I usually have to reconfigure the RAID after removing a battery.
@@bustaballs array settings are both held on the disks and the controller, hencewhy it's possible to change out a controller and simply import the array config from the disks. Be pretty crap if you couldn't do that in a datacenter environment.
I bought 2 x R820's loaded with 4 x CPU's and 256GB, 1 running Proxmox, the other Azure Stack (ASDK)! Great systems!
I just posted a question above about the r710 vs r720 and a second question about the r7 series vs the r8 series. Please take a look at it! Also, what are your thoughts on the r810 vs r820 vs the r840? (I think I have the model numbers right? I may have those mixed up. I haven't had time to pay any attention to my home lab in about three months and I finally have some time!) My ideal home lab server would have quad Xeons with pcie 3.0 and at least a dozen, if not more, drive bays. I'm torn between 3.5 and 2.5 drives because the 3.5 drives are so cheap! I run Proxmox too, but in your comment you say you have Proxmox and Azure. What have you found for pros and cons? I really struggled to learn Proxmox but I (generally) have a good handle on it now although I think it's still a bit top heavy and frankly, just a bit of a pain to work with even now that I understand it. Thanks! ( Had to make edits to ask the right questions!)
@@mattb9876 My choice for 820 was really about expansion and compatibility with $'s in mind. x20 series is the first series that has direct Windows 2016 support with Windows 2019 drivers available. And it came in cheaper of course than the newer x40 series. I already have 2 NAS's, so choosing the 2.5" drives to have more physical drives (more IOPs) and lower power footprint since it's home-lab was right for me. I have 3.5" larger drives in my NAS's for file storage. Proxmox is my choice for my home lab on 1 of my servers, I'm running Azure Stack on the other for work (learning Azure stack) - no other reason for running this. The 820's for me just had the right power/price point.
Loud is a relative term. We used to have IBM X series servers in our DC. Those were louder at idle than the Dells at full throttle.
You forgot to mention that for the rear drive bays or 'flex bays' you can get a pass through backplane that hooks up to the front backplane. I've done that on my LFF R720xd and use 2 SSDs for the OS in RAID1
Wonderful servers for a lab or small business. I can see a trio of them in a Ceph+Proxmox combined cluster.
Booting off the dual SD cards that most sell servers have is a great option over the USB port. Very typical for ESXi and other boot to RAM operating systems.
Thank you for your videos. They are helpful, informative, and non clickbait. Breath of fresh air :)
I've got several R720's in multiple different deployments. Great machines.
any as ESXi hosts? (v6.5 or higher?)
@@brianthomason6690 Yessir. I've got 4 running with 6.7 installed. No issues.
@@akletke1 Don't know why VMWare doesn't list them as 6.7 compatible. Planning a 5.1 migration and we've been pricing out used Dell 720/730's. Most I've asked lately are running 6.5 or higher
@@brianthomason6690 It's not that they aren't compatible. They aren't supported. Meaning you won't get any support from VMware should you encounter an issue with them. Mine have been churning away for the last several years. I've got three at two non profit campuses that run 5 VMs each. We got them used from government surplus and threw some drives and ram in them. My other one is here at my work that we purchased new in 2012 its the 720xd with 24 2.5" bays. It started its life as an ESXi server with 5.1 I think. Just recently "replaced" it with a pair of R440's. But I still have it in the cluster running a majority of our production VMs. I can also say in 10 years of running VMware I have filed 0 tech support tickets.
I had no idea about the color codes for those lol. Maybe I should be reading the manuals? Nah, I'll just keep watching this channel. Love the content.
Watch this and have a look on his channel, he does a lot of flashing to it firmware th-cam.com/video/Y1Xi5NZRlXM/w-d-xo.html
I have a 610 for storage and a 710 as the server, both run on mirrored wd blacks, it's been running great without any maintenance.
Thanks for this video. I've been looking into an R720 or R720XD and decided to pick one up. Thanks to your discount code, I was able to load up on RAM and upgrade the CPUs and stay nicely within my budget.
When it arrives, I'll be setting up TrueNAS Core, a backup share, a Plex Media Server share, and maybe some other VMs in bhyve!
I'm only running one service on my R720XD. It's currently my blue iris server. With only one camera running now ( I plan to run at least 8) it is super quite. Because I'm space constrained in my home, my server rack for my homelab is in my office. when the AC is running, I can't hear my R720XD over the AC unit. When its all said and done, I doubt 8 cameras will hit the cpu's hard enough to ramp up the fans.
Just an opinion about the problems with fans. In the mold industry, in racks that are not well insulated, it is common for wear material from the molds along with fine oil to lodge in the fans and can damage them. It is always good to isolate as much as possible and filter the rack.
Very excited about these videos. I bought a Dell R710 and installed freeNAS some time ago. I have not proper utilized it, so videos from you would be greatly appreciated.
Speaking of cheap on eBay, I got an r710 with a pair of CPU’s, 128g ram and the PERC700 controller for $210. Running ESXi with 6x6tb drives. Killer deal for a garage file/Plex server. I’ve added a mellanox 10G card connecting a few other devices via a Mikrotik 10g switch. These 700 series PowerEdge servers are basically bulletproof.
STOP buying R710s (or HP G7s). They are Nehalem/Westmere processors and WAY less power efficient than the 720 (or HPE Gen8).
@@Casper042 I don't really care about power efficiency. I care about that price tag. It essentially sits idle 99% of the time. 720's start at around $550~600. When they get cheaper, I'll consider it but right now, my server's job is to sit there basically idle and hold data and receive backups from a few computers each night.
@@FastRedPonyCar This doesn't make sense. If you care about price but not power efficiency you are eventually going to end up paying more for the electric for inferior older hardware then you would have for the r720 that is going to have a longer useful life. Also all that for a file server with plex? LOLOLOL and the R710 can only hold 6 drives which is even funnier. Would have been better off using the r710 as a VM rig and having a low power storage box to feed everything.
@@AustinMichael The power bill doesn't concern me, again, this was only about the money and how much I was willing to invest in this. Only 6 drives is only 6x 6TB HGST's = only 24TB of space. Plenty for me. Look, for $210, you don't say no. You CAN find a use for hardware like that and for me, saving the $350~450 vs the 720 gave me the money to upgrade my network components to 10gig which is FAR more valuable to me than power efficiency. Also, without actual power consumption numbers between the two servers, the efficiency of the 720 over the 710 isn't really a talking point either. My 710 sits at roughly 10% CPU usage tops at any given time and only is using 1 PSU.
Great timing on this, as I had just been looking at building a new FreeNAS server... and the Dell R720 was at the top of the list. One of the things that concerned me was whether there would be a RAID controller in the way, and you anticipated that question!
I went out to Tech Supply Direct and spec'd out a couple of servers, added them to my wish list, and found that the wishlist just saves that I liked the R720, but doesn't save any of the configuration options that I specified.
The rear 2.5 slots, you will need a backplane and a SAS cable from the front sas expander 😀
Yup. Just make sure you get the right one... the 2.5" version has different cables than the 3.5" version... if you buy a 2.5" version, The flex bay board works as well as the power cable. The SAS cable is too short and has the wrong angle connection...but if you get a great deal on the 2.5" version, you only need to buy the right SAS SFF-8087 cable.
The battery is not there to hold the configuration of the raid controller. Config is stocked in eeprom flash. The battery is there to maintain data stored in the cache to avoid data corruption in case of power interruption...
For the iDRACs you might want to get the Dell VFlash SD Cards. It lets you load an ISO to them, and then the software emulates an optical drive you can boot from to install the OS. This comes in handy when you do things remotely.
With iDRAC enterprise you can mount an ISO from local drive, USB, CD etc. No need for proprietary cards.
@@formulauno376
The iDRAC enterprise are the ones that have the SD card slot. The whole point in using the vFlash is If you have nothing on the onboard drives and control the system remotely. iDRAC is its own system and has the capability to emulate a boot device that would be used by the actual server. The iDRAC does not normally access the server's local drives nor does the server directly access the SD card slot on the iDRAC. There are several PDFs online from Dell detailing all the information. The vFlash card alows 16 partitions which each can be turned into a floppy drive, hd, or optical drive.
I just ordered a flashed H710 mini and a 10 gig nic for my R720XD
Dear Tom. Loving these recent videos. Many thanks!!!
I still have a Dell PowerEdge 2970 Dual AMD Opteron 6 core in my basement I don't know why but its running as a file server..
and a Dual Xeon X5660's 48gb of ram as my plex server. old servers rock
I looked at one server on Google and this was in my recommended.. Thanks Google.
In my 15 years in business I've just got 1 fan of a server gone bad, I've had about 2 Powersupplies gone bad as well.
About 300 servers in total - not tat much but I think fans do not fail any more, also power supplies do not fail.
For example: I've got 2 CPU fails in 1 year, also got some sas backplanes failing more often than drives as well.....it all depends on the models as well.
the 2 sata port on r720 motherboard is available, you can find 5v power in the little 4pin slot nearing sata. these 2 hdds can only run in soft RAID mode or normal ahci mode
Do you have a link to a cable used to convert the 5v to sata power connectors?
iDrac email notifications the mark of a true expert
He needs to do an Udemy course. Great video. Just picked up a 730xd monday
I'm looking forward to seeing the projects you do with this Tom. I've been eyeing the R720XD for a couple months now, but I'm planning to build a new Ryzen machine first.
Great video. I've watched for a while but this got me to sub. Keep it up!
I bought a second hand dell r720 in 2018. To install freenas, you need a lsi HBA card (such as flashed h310), important: the mini version h310 can't be flashed
maybe they find a method to flash mini h310. www.ixsystems.com/community/threads/dell-perc-h310-mini-mono-flashing-to-it-mode.75956/
Yes it can
its worth to note that the ssd on the back can be used for the so called cachecade mode
upgrade the CPU's to 26xx v2 CPU's to get a bit more horse power out of it. I like to install the OS then use the System Update Utility to upgrade ALL of the firmware in one shot.
Thanks for the video and walkthrough
It's a pain, but you can also create a virtual drive for each physical drive on the raid controller if you have a controller than cannot go into (or be flashed) in IT mode. I'm running ZFS this way with 6 drives.
Looks interesting. My Unraid server is in desperate need of upgrade. Running some 6 "core" Athlon. Think a 12 core 3rd gen Ryzen build might he a better option.
Another excellent video, thanks! If you have some free time / need an idea for this server. Would you mind making a video on how to properly setup and configure NextCloud on FreeNAS?
Good Info & explanation bro!! Keep it up
I love how servers don't sound like they are booting up, they sound like they are taking off.
These are all over eBay for super cheap! (With storage!)
We have some 730xd for 3.5 HDD capacity drives, but it’s not a good server for NVMe as it is limited to 4 drives. And with the backplane for smaller drives it’s a bit questionable if you want to go 2HU.
"Battery is there to hold settings" I really do wonder how you came to that conclusion
I've never had a server ps failure.
Dual ps is more for dual power sources - which is mostly useful for multiple UPS's unless you're colo'd in a big boy dc with multiple power providers.
Where can I get a note of all the components and troubleshooting?
Yes! I need some mentorship with FreeNas. Looking forward to the future videos
doesn't look like that h310 was actually flashed to IT mode. looks like the normal pass-through.
that was my thought
You make the best videos Tom!
Which 3.5in drive bay adapters do you like and do they effectively limit airflow going through the hot swap bay? My empty drive bays are preventing air from flowing over my disks and I'd just assume plan ahead for creating an SSD backed volume rather than fill the empty slots with a bit of foam.
thank you so much for this!!!!
3:05 its an hba310 not h310, flashing with it mode a minimono card it bricks the firmware and cannot work anymore
7:10 the chassis on mine is covering the plastic levers to release the fan assembly... no idea what's going on
When can we expect the next Dell R720XD video to come out, I am in the process of upgrading my Dell R720XD and want to figure out what CPU to upgrade to for best performance as I am running my system as a HyperV host.
Hi! Nice video and tour of the R720XD. This video is probably the biggest reason that I bought this server of eBay some weeks ago :) My plan was to boot Proxmox from the two onboard SATA ports (05:17) and passthrough the H310 Mini Mono (flashed to IT mode) to a FreeNAS VM. I have now read that the ports are SATA II, which I guess I can live with, but also that they are disabled on the R720XD. Is this true? I haven't tried to attach any drives since I don't have any power cables yet and don't want to buy any if the ports are unusable.
I have swaped my h310 for a proper HBA because the h310 performance was not great.
root/calvin ...I know you well
14g comes with random passwords if you want
Calvin Calvin Calvin
Thank you
In addition to (or instead of) FreeNAS for your coming projects, maybe XigmaNAS. It's the more "pure" descendant of the real FreeNAS, but it's come a long way. It now does RootOnZFS etc, and it's a much nicer, cleaner experience than FreeNAS in my opinion.
other than your claim if a "nice experience" are their any objectively better reasons to use it?
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS More lightweight, and a better user experience, high reliability, you can run VM's on it which may come in handy and ZFS. FreeNAS doesn't suck, I just don't prefer it, and the UI on it is a bit of a pet peeve for me. You can also run XigmaNAS embedded, ie boot it off something like a USB stick, and save all the drive spaces for storage, but that's probably more of a home user feature where every SATA port is gold.
Other than the UI being different, you have not mentioned any features that FreeNAS does not have, it supports jails, VM's USB stick install & boot so I am not clear on the advantage it offers.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS It's a NAS distro built on FreeBSD 12, so it's not going to be night and day in functionality aside from look, feel and design. I just wanted to mention it as it is very much a valid option to going with FreeNAS. They'll both be using the ZFS etc provided by FreeBSD and all that good stuff, I just prefer XigmaNAS, the old-school original-FreeNAS-looking UI, and the stability and on-going development. I mean, at least the dev team doesn't have the burning shame of ever having created FreeNAS 10 Corral... :) I presume FreeNAS has made strides since, guess I should fire up a VM just to take a look. I'm not saying it's mandatory to switch, I'm just saying this is an interesting option for home- and pro users alike.
Hi. I need your help. what do you recommend how many watts rack UPS for dual 750w Dell R730xd?
Live on the Bleeding Edge?
The R720 is 3 generations old, running Sandy/Ivy bridge processors.
It's at LEAST 3 years old, and could be up to 5 years old.
How is replacing that because of a company on the "bleeding edge"?
Not to mention the R750 likely launches next year with Cooper Lake.
I was speaking in general there are good deals on servers coming out of data centers available from Tech Supply Direct, not that this server was a year old.
What he was referring to was the companies that upgrade every year keep pushing tons of stock down the pipeline to homelab users for pennies on the dollar. It takes a few generations but R720's are finally pretty cheap
HI friend how do u do thanks for your demonstartion can u please focus on Parrot Linux
Hi,
I have just purchased my first server Dell R720 but when I switch it on it comes with the omnicube logo instead of the dell logo, can anyone explain to me what’s going on.
Thank you
Great video!
Is it a process to convert the raid card to IT mode? I read there is a process to do it? I assume the non-raid option is only available once the card is flashed to IT mode?
Please review Dell R7515 also :(
do you typically run both psu's @ once ? or use one @ a time ?
I cannot open the Idrac gui. I have Idrac 7. I have it set up as dedicated port, I’ve tried dhcp and static ip. I’ve added the https to white list. I’ve tried chrome, Firefox, explorer, none of them will find the Idrac. Chrome says refused connection. I’m at a loss. My router is edge router 4
i just flashed my h710p mini into IT mode for unRAID, just fyi for some tech minded people!
Where did you get the information to do that?
I wonder how much power this thing would consume ...
Entirely depends what you have in it. Mine's got two 3ghz processors and 768GB (yes, GB) RAM for ESXi and a bunch of SSDs for storage and in Performance per Watt mode it draws about 180watts idle, only. Obviously if it's working hard it'll draw significantly more, but just because it's big and heavy doesn't mean it's a power guzzler. Older servers definitely used to be, before active power management was a thing.
I just bought one last month it came from Pfizer. Did you flash the h310MM to IT mode yourself? You know.... you could be the first on a how to flash the H310 mini to IT mode 🥺
I flashed my H310 mini integrated in my R720 myself but just by following another guy's instructions. You do have to pay attention and not just copy and paste things though. You also need to have some basic Linux knowledge. Here's a link to the tutorial I followed and some discussion on the process: www.reddit.com/r/homelab/comments/bkxszi/flashing_the_h310_mono_mini_to_it_mode/
Just a heads up though: be careful what guide you follow! Many don't include a necessary step for the PERC H310 MINI cards and can brick the card if you don't add the critical info in the flashing process. The guide I linked to covers this. Hope that helps!
@@livewiretechnicalservices8307 do you have a link to the 2118it.bin?
@@mattybeans2322 Yep it's in the link I posted. Be sure to read that document carefully. There are some pitfalls! Don't wanna overlook stuff and brick your card. Here's the link from the document: docs.broadcom.com/docs-and-downloads/host-bus-adapters/host-bus-adapters-common-files/sas_sata_6g_p20/9211-8i_Package_P20_IR_IT_FW_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows.zip
@@livewiretechnicalservices8307 just finished it today! i was having issues for weeks using debian stretch. im pretty sure it was a hugepages thing. i ended up using ubuntu with no issues. thanks for the .bin!
Are you going to run Esxi or Server 2019 HyperV on this server? I have two of these servers at home and I am really glad to see you have one and can't wait to see what you can do with it.
Jim Holloway he is running XCP-NG if you missed it for the hypervisor
Tech Supply doesn't offer a 700+ GB memory option, it caps out at 384 on the 720xd (2.5 bay), not sure if I'm missing something on their configuration page..
For the full loadout you need LRDIMMs, which they probably don't stock.
How well does H310 passthrough work from XCP-NG to FreeNAS?
So far the testing I have done it is worked well but I haven't really dug into the performance of it just yet.
Lawrence Systems / PC Pickup keep us posted because i had bad experiences with h310 it mode performance. Ended up putting in a lsi hba which made the server way louder :(
can I plug this server into pc desktop with rj45 or has it to be connected directly to the router?
R710 owner, Where/How can i get a cheap IDrag battory.
3 weeks after I got my R710 it started warning my about the IDrag battery (so i think i got a bit cheated,)
payed 110€ for it without shipping 50€ shipping.
it had 2 higher cpu's (dont have the ex sect numbers here)
8x 4gb 32gb ram.
no driverbays
no hdd's
Idrag 6
so where can i find a good battery? or can i build it my self
Can you render videos or stream games on it? can you ever try to use it with Avermedia Live Gamer HD 2?
I have 2 of these R720XD servers and I have noticed a lot of noise with the fans, on startup do you have any suggestions on making the server quieter? replacing fans with other plug able fans??
His phone on the edge is killing me...
I wanna run VMs of both Windows Server and FreeNAS on ESXi using RAID controller. Is this possible? Any idea how to make this happen?
I have the same server, but it has old BIOS and firmware versions. Can I leapfrog to the latest of each? The virtual console is also Java based. Grrr.
I wonder if you can have hackintosh VM’s for video editing running in a server like that
csgrullon if you build it on a Mac and transfer it to this machine yes. But you will possibly get nag screen.
Hi, Can I install the Grid K1 Nvidia on the R720xd, will it work great?
Dunno, never tried
Yet! SSD-EEZ
For a lab environment thats damn expensive.
Ummm.... AWS?
A couple questions about this. I currently have a completely loaded r710 with 6x 3.5 2gb drives. I'm constrained by that storage after the necessary RAID 6 has been applied. How many parts from the r710 parts can be swapped into the r720? Or perhaps it's not worth it? I have 128gb RAM and the better hex core dual procs in my current server (I don't have it's specs right in front of me at the moment, sorry). Is the r720 still pcie 2.0 as well? My other consideration is moving to an r8xx server but that's definitely an expensive idea since very little, if any, hardware will transfer to that line of server. Thanks!
affiliate link is now dead
That server is no longer available but the LTSERVICES offer code still works on their site.
'love' the way this guy touches the electronics wtf
It created good engagement on TH-cam.
@@LAWRENCESYSTEMS do you mean a discussion about static?
Are there to different servers Dell PowerEdge R720XD and R720
XD = 'Extra Drives' - basically the same servers but the XD is optimised for as many drives as possible so different internal layout and backplanes.
Barely seeing this video, is the TechSupplyDirect legit? thinking of ordering an R710
Yes
R720XD? Boi that older 12gen model. Newer model will be R740XD with iDrac 9
How many cores does that server have?
Depends on the CPU, mine has 12 in total between two CPU's
Does this server come with 24 2.5" drive?
You can order it that way.