 Yeah, so monkey server monkey. I want to give a shout out to them They gave me a deal on a server and Some people asked about specking out servers and doing things for zen and how do you speck out a server? Well, unless you have really high compute requirements, which for this task, we don't this is actually just gonna run some of our virtual machines Which is pretty basic Requirements, which is our point of sale. It's all running on very low spec hardware. Yes. This is ours. I forgot. Yeah He thought I was going to do a client. Oh That means we're replacing the virtual thing. Yes. Can I have that board? Yes So the discussion has come up before whether or not you run on consumer hardware or if you run on server hardware Six one way half a dozen the other there. Yeah, there's some validity to both Consumer hardware has become way more reliable in the past years than it ever was before Servers have also been increasing reliability, but they've always been reliable and The bottom line with this one was a server that would also house 10 gigabit So this is also not in this video, but the next video covering the details server We'll show how we're going to migrate zen over 10 gigabit with ice guzzy and I'll put together a whole video on that But that's the servers are nice when you need like something like this for when you need higher RAM and processing power Versus, you know, like a new horizon build you can get some of these for less than a new rise in build, right? And the rises are really nice Yeah, also are not on the compatibility list for zen So if you're looking for a hundred percent compatibility the risings have not made the list doesn't mean they won't make the list that This is a Dell server that is on the list So we're gonna unbox it and cover the details of this server and talk about it open it up So we got the server unboxed I got a box sitting under it So it's kind of tilted so you can see here and I'll do a few close-ups of what's in here and what I want to talk about today is The server the specking it out and we know the consumer hardware debate So I have built servers on consumer hardware and some people are like no It's going to die if you don't care about your data The reality is if the budget does not allow for a let's say enterprise deployment Then you have to kind of fit with with the client's budget is so as much as I would love to only sell super high-end equipment I Just sometimes it doesn't fit the budget We're in the small business market not the enterprise market and you can build reliable servers on essentially what you may call Consumer-grade hardware, which is you know the commodity stuff that you buy versus the enterprise hardware now We picked this server up for relatively inexpensive. This is an older Dell R710 now It's really a neat that this server is old as it is But because it has dual processors Rivals some of the processing power you can get for price per dollar I mean obviously it's not going to match a thread ripper But you get a pretty impressive amount of performance out of these and they're reasonably priced I mean this server you can find this on server monkey comm under five hundred dollars and they offer warranties on these and what we have here is I've added more RAM to it, but as they shipped it was 32 gigs of RAM dual 2.9 Xeon processors They're the X 5670 models. So that means there is six cores in here six cores in here 12 cores between them plus the virtual cores because each core can be hyper-thundered to a virtual core So now we have 24 cores of processing power. This actually puts it quite up there I think around 12,000 if you're using CPU mark to kind of just give you engage the raw processing power That's not bad. That's a lot of processing power to be had for a complete server The the cheapest Ryzen's even are going to be about more expensive than this to get it's close to the same level of compute power Obviously the thread ripper beats it out the cheapest rubber beats it out But the cheapest rubber upper costs more than its entire server that we had shipped to us including the shipping So this is our virtualization server that we're going to be using for some more projects that we have and more videos that are coming Because we put 40 gigs of RAM total in here shipped with 32 We had like I said eight more laying around so we have a total of 40 gigs and The enterprise hardware is designed a lot different. You have a lot more modularness to it So if I wanted to remove a fan I can just simply pull the fan out and this fans keep them be replaced live with the machine Some of the newest enterprise hardware we've seen by Lenovo They have a way without taking a lid off that you can replace it They even have the whole motherboard on its own trays and so does the True nas boxes when we're going to review those it's really neat when you start messing with enterprise hardware. They make it very modular. They make it very Well designed to all work together fit together cable managed and everything else and these servers come in different configurations We have one that has Eight two and a half inch and the reason why and I love that they come with these nice little press the button and they pop right out and Like the hard drives we went with SSDs in here because this is only going to boot Zen server doesn't need a lot So we have just 240 gig SSDs that provides enough small amount of local storage in case I do you want to run a VM on it? For example, we're probably gonna run Zen orchestra on it just for management So this can boot up Zen orchestra boot up and we can see visibility in the machine And then what we've added in here is a 10 gigabit controller with SFP plus now this is going to This is a controller. We got from I think you could say it. Chelsio Chelso these are common controllers. These were like, I don't know $40 on Amazon I'll throw a link below so you can find it and this gives me 10 gigabit connectivity to free nas these cards are both supported in Zen and in free nas and are just a standard PCI 8x slot So there's nothing real special and this old server has a slot that will handle it and recognizes the card now Like I said the if you're building enterprise hardware, you get some cool features I'm gonna show you some of the things that come built in on these for example the iDRAC Which is the management system that even while the server is not powered up as far as the motherboard running But does have power to the power supply it lets you see things like the wattage It lets you see the fans and things like that and what this offers is what they may refer to as like an out-of-band management So if you have rows of servers in a data center, you know physically what server it is But you don't have time to run to the data center But you want to get into the settings and change something or see what's going on with the power supply or if there's been a failure This is kind of like bypasses and has its own small operating system that operates on the first port of the ethernet and allows you to do that So these these are definitely an option when you're speccing it out now This like I said may be real low for what your needs are But you can find use servers for pretty reasonable prices and some of them aren't that old So you can get that so if you don't if you go I got enough budget to buy something enterprise and my compute power needs are not super high I You can find these for very reasonable prices and you know still get your projects done and this one here I mean it's not going to break the bank if you're getting into and want to engineer your own lab This is really cool because it's one single box and on the nice thing about the R710 is the wattage consumption and This system idles at about a hundred and seventy two watts when you load up all 24 cores I've seen it hit about 350 or so watts. That's not too bad That's one of the things if you go with some of the really old servers One of the things you realize with some of them You have to go look at the efficiency servers as they got newer got more efficient course the new ones are more expensive But that's a consideration depending on how much your power costs So depending on where you live We're lucky here in Michigan because our commercial power rates are actually really low I think there was a chart and we were one of the lowest in the Continental US but that becomes a concern because they also don't just use more power if they're using a lot of power They also produce a lot of heat and if they're producing a lot of heat You also have to figure out unless it's cold outside what to do with all that extra heat So server room cooling or if you have this in your bedroom because you're doing it as a project in your home lab That is a consideration of how hot will it be in my room? And we've seen that because the you can pick up for they actually have a little bit more power You can find some of the four processor for socketed processors the downside is a lot of those older servers They may rival this in speed, but they are Substantially when you have four giant zions, they're trying to cool the thing just acts like a hairdryer sitting there blowing hot air So as well as considerations when you're building these going okay I want to spec out a server now compatibility. I mentioned that the thread rippers are not on The compatibility list Now what that basically means when you're when you're really specking things out is they you want things on the compatibility list if you're going Okay, I need absolutely nothing to ever have a problem So you go with the most compatible this being older is long since been on the compatibility list for things like son You can actually go there under Compatibility list and find it. I imagine it's on the compatibility list for ESXi and several other Hypervisors so that's something really nice. I have for example I have a really old option on board that we I did my original Zen testing and what happened was it works great It seems never to crash or have a problem, but it does have a problem if I reboot it It just doesn't reboot it just doesn't seem to it starts the reboot process It just stops and you have to power it off and power it back on The parts in it are hodge podge together. It's an older board And I know it had some problems as far as because it's got two memory slots It's just simply don't recognize anymore So I know there's some weird issue with the board But it's funny because sometimes those are things you may run into that may or may not get fixed when you're using Some of the consumer hardware doesn't mean it won't work But it becomes more of a trial and error versus I know that I load Zen on our 270 and It just works so that's some of the back and forth you may have with it and Dell and Other large server manufacturers often work to build a machine that works exactly with something like ESX or Zen They work to go. Okay, we know the specs. We know that this is the what this is going to be used for so they're so purpose-designed So the other nice thing about the like I said, once you go to the enterprise hardware It doesn't look really cool that besides that but the The ease of finding parts for a several several year old server if you choose one right is actually really funny How inexpensive it is these fans on eBay? I look they're like $6. So if a fan goes out a few bucks the power supplies The power supply for this and they're modular The modular power supply this has dual redundant ones as well. They're only I think these are $29 I found them on eBay and I think new ones are on Amazon They listed as not used for something like 50 bucks So you can actually get these for relatively cheap now and one thing I will say for enterprise hardware They don't use just any fans the fans and everything are of high quality because when Dell designed this They're pretty much expecting it to go into service and not be pulled out of service until it's just absolutely Absolute and my friend to work in the enterprise world will tell you I talked to a friend who works for a very large Fortune 500 company and he told me you wouldn't believe just how many windows 2,000 servers We still have in use and they're running on enterprise hardware The servers have long since should have died as he put it but because they're not died and They still run and they're still sitting there and they still operate the thing they operate even though They're out of cycle out of life way behind patched So they got him hidden behind firewalls no one wants to replace them and these things just keep chugging away You that's part of the reason you can find so many these pulled out of service for companies We're more forward thinking or have really high demands on compute power you can find these for reasonably priced matter of fact I've gotten lucky before and bought some servers off Craigslist that still had warranty on them from Dell They were being gotten rid of by a company that They just have a real high churn and needed faster ones and we actually bought all of them because we realized they had five-year warranties They were only two years into the warranty near replacing servers I don't know what logic got them to replace them But we had we had acquired a bunch of high-end servers that we ended up deploying for Crazy great price and we bought them directly from the company so it wasn't really shady or anything They just didn't need them anymore. So that's a look of the enterprise hardware I'm going to show you some of the iDRAC features next I'll log into that kind of give you an idea of what it looks like which is really novel on these And these are nice features you get when you go with the enterprise hardware As far as like truly specking things out I'm going to cover that detail a little bit later here in the video And talk about how you kind of calculate some of that and that's Oh, that's that's a little bit of magic Uh, there's not always as easy of a way to do this, but I'll talk a little bit about that in a second all right, so this is the integrated Dell remote access controller and like I said, it's essentially a Way to get into kind of like the bios or see what's going on in a system Even if it's not completely powered off I mean it has to have power for this to work But you assign it an IP address and then you can see things inside of here So we have the system overview. We have the iDRAC settings here So we can see the controller network settings ipv4 if we need to change something in there Creature users in here We just have an anonymous disabled and then the thomas user enabled right now that I have Administrative rights over but let's take a look at the fan for example Now it does not work super fast. This is a pretty basic integrated controller It's like its own small operating system on the on there But it tells you the system board fan the rpms and I think this is kind of cool too Is it's got the temperature in here so you can see some of the history? Intrusion it will let you know if the chassis is open or closed So it can let you know where alert you if someone's inside of there It'll do the power monitoring And this is stuff that you you know can frequency in a bios of a lot of boards But it this one gets a lot more detail because you have the statistics average watt usages and things like that So right now it's showing an average power consumption of 205 Here was where I powered it up and did some testing it jumped up to 338 watts and you can reset these statistics But it's kind of nice because it gives you that level of detail inside of here To be able to do that. You can also see the voltages So it can alert you if there's you know any of the v-core voltages for any of the cpu's the board Or the power suppliers having any problems and you know Like I said, it's just kind of novel and it also gives you battery status So there is a battery because this these have hardware raid and the hardware raid controllers use a battery to Determine the settings and retain those settings. Not just the this is not saved into a system bios chip It's separate on a separate card So you have a system board battery, which is actually your standard coin battery You see on most motherboards and then you have a storage battery, which is actually a larger Brick on them, which is kind of novel All right, so let's actually talk a little bit about the system speed then we'll get into about specking out the hardware So here's the windows 10 machine that's inside of here I have some processors assigned to it and I actually Like created a virtual machine on here says she's pretty snappy, but the console on this is kind of mediocre So I like to use rdp because it just works a lot faster than trying to do everything inside of this little console And I'll show you already have the results of the test which are Right here and you can see the cpu mark score of 11,082. That's while running virtualized. So it's not horrible It says I'm in the 91 percent pentyle and for as old as this server is I think it's almost like seven or eight years old That horrible and this is obviously running virtual which has its own overhead. So it's not running raw on the hardware Uh, and I also opened up photoshop and was just playing around with things inside of here It it's snappy very usable and for the age of the machine and running virtual that works very well Now when it comes to some of the specs for us, we are Just going to be running a bunch of pf sense instances And pf sense doesn't have even for routing At a high speed does not have really high end requirements If you actually look at the processors at pf sense is using not a whole lot The other linux servers that we have as well like our point of sale and our wiki server Even our screen connects or handles our remote connections. You're talking like a gig of ram and a low processor so something like this for our compute power becomes Really reasonable like it just does not take a lot of horsepower to run a lot of the things that we have Or the linux servers that we're deploying and this is the case for a lot of special use things We have we have some clients that are using Then with some older servers like this one of them is actually running for years has been running on one of these R710s because also this is a basic inventory management system Written in my sequel that takes a series of things and these things do not have high compute power Therefore, we just need a good reliable server for them. Make sure we have plenty of backups And that's one nice thing about when you should virtualize it We back up the entire virtual machine put it onto a file and you know have a copy of it So we're really solid on those But it just doesn't have a lot of high end requirements But what if you do let's talk about that So your server monkey com and this is where we bought the server from they actually have some good deals on a lot of Different servers if you're looking used And want something that's got some performance, but you don't want to break the bank on it They do a lot of Dell and HP servers and these these are pretty nice And you can get them shipped with you with the 10 gigabit nick and things like that Now calculating what your requirements are becomes sometimes even a debate between you and the vendor We had a vendor that we just felt was slightly underspecking what they wanted to tell them Like oh our computer requirements are really really low Their program was a little bigger than they said and we really looked at it and it was kind of a pain Other clients we've had where we can't believe what the server requirements are But a lot of times you start that process by going what is you know, for example The database system that runs a carpet store. You wouldn't think needs to be that big They were having all kinds of problems are still in debate about them But I think it's because the software is horribly coded is most of my opinion on that But their database is five gigs running in sequel and it really really grinds a lot just to look up a customer and They were like what are you what are you going to do? So we ended up upgrading the server to something with really high, you know, it's a really nice rate array Built for performance rate 10 was kind of the solution because I'm like why is the database so big the company goes That's how it is So it's going back and forth to them some determining that is not always the easiest or most fluid way The other thing that can be a little tricky is when you look at If you google rds sizing capacity planning guide and right here's one from microsoft who Maybe i'm just missing something, but here's their one and it's a seven year old guide So I don't understand there's newer if you just google search it some more You can find some other people in good discussions if you're doing a bunch of remote users And some solutions to that and I seen this one was some of these are marked as solved and how much specs you need to go on there And it's funny because here's a newer even the newer posts go back and microsoft apparently deleted this one But there's a lot of people referencing some of these older articles So it can be a little bit tricky I generally recommend as much as you can go over because these are once you put a server in a generally Going to be out there for quite a number of years Unless you're going cloud compute and this is kind of the advantage of cloud compute. We can just elastically as they say it Do it as needed so you can say okay? Let's just make this bigger no problem add a little more compute time No problem, but that gets out of hand occasionally as well one of my friends His project has literally saved his company a fortune because they had spun up so many things in amazon They ended up overpaying because they just Does it a why not spin up another instance and the previous it people spun up so many that they were spending Just an absurd amount of money. He's cut their amazon bill by 40 percent just by going. Why do we have everything set to this? So that can be kind of another tricky part But like I said, I I almost want to say there's not an absolute guide I don't know anyone I've ever met who says this is exactly how you do it Even when you get on the phone and talk back and forth with the Dell people So the best thing is if you can reach out to people who are running the same compute platform or the same tools that you have Say they're going to run the same thing find out what they're using With the carpet company. We were kind of shocked at what they wanted us Wanted to do and we had the same thing with the database company for one of our transportation clients because they wanted a Really high-end spec for just a warehousing software So we built it and you know it works great. It's actually really fast But it was kind of a wow and so was the customer because they ended up spending 11 000 dollars in hardware To run a database that manages their warehouse. I mean, that's expensive that the contract there for the warehouse Is lucrative for them. So they understood they had to pay it. I know the warehousing software was also expensive They just were kind of shocked that overall they spent, you know, it was a 30 something thousand dollar project form It turned out just to get a management program to Manage and do this and but you can kind of see it was going back and forth Sometimes the requirements are lower or higher. You got to really work with the vendors to truly spec that out. But the Server monkey.com likes they're one of the popular ones there and they have some of these Dell's, uh, you know 7 3 10 7 30s The reason we price and you can customize these and build them from there And you know build your own lab if you want if you're just looking for something basic where you just have Like we do we don't have really high demand compute power It doesn't take a high end processor to run all the different linux virtual machines that we have nature of them They're just not not that intense. We have 6 000 clients in our database, but Uh, I can do a database query on under a second on some older specced hardware because everything's written really really efficient I will tell you some of these things written on top of sequel and windows not efficient are not well coded And they have high compute time. They need a lot of horsepower to make up for sloppy coding So that is something you may run into when you're trying to spec out servers for your customers So if you like to kind of hear like subscribe Hopefully this guide was someone helpful talking a little bit about this and kind of give you an idea of some of the enterprise versus consumer hardware and You know, I'll look at what you get of course as you get to the newer servers They are amazing and they have all kinds of even more cool features So once again, if you like to count here like and subscribe. See you guys next time