 Tom here from Orange Systems and Tech Supply Direct has sent me a Dell 730xd that I want to talk about and review here So this is from Tech Supply Direct on loan from them for some testing and then I do have to send it back But if you want to learn more about me and my company head over to LawrenceSystems.com If you'd like to hire a short project there's a hires button up at the top If you'd like to support this channel in other ways There's affiliate links down below to get you deals and discounts on products and services We talk about a channel including deals from Tech Supply Direct So we've used them to buy a lot of server equipment. That's you know, not necessarily brand new slightly used They have things newer than this 730 I've been asked before why I like to review some of the other hardware And I'm like well This is easier for someone to get started in their home lab and sometimes very adequate and plenty of power for many companies And there's still plenty of life left in a 730 now They do have some like I said the more modern was there We have an offer code that gets you 10% off your purchase at Tech Supply Direct And you know someone we've been using for a while and we reached out to them and you know We find a lot of stuff we talked to them And we're going to work out some deals where they send us some hardware for some more demos to kind of show you What the options are Frequently we've worked with people who have purchased from Tech Supply Direct But then after they purchase we just remotely Go in and configure things because we not everything that goes Purchase wise comes through here for me to review So they sent this in for review and I wanted something that would run free NAS really well And as you've seen from the beginning here, we got 24 drives up in the front And we got a couple more drives and we flip it around the back now Hiding in the back here So we got these two in the back which are SSDs And ideally you could use them for loading your OS on I decided instead and we'll jump to the overhead here in a second And go over the parts on this I decided instead to load the OS on a thumb drive That way all the drives are available and I could do some tests And we'll do a couple benchmarks on this and a little bit of testing As you know, of course, what is a system if you don't at least see if it actually performs So I'm not going to spend too much time on synthetic benchmarks We'll hook up some Use this as a storage array for my xcpng and show the performance that we can get Over a 10 gig interface on here So let's take a look from the overhead and dive into it For several generations, the Dell servers, the Dell rack servers Have a pretty similar layout to each other So we're going to remove the air plenum right here And you can reveal we've got 64 gigs of ram in it We'll give to the actual detailed specs when we log into the iDRAC system We do have the flant, the fans which are removable And nice fan system on here They're not dual fans, they are single each one But hot swappable, so pretty easy there If you wanted to take the entire fan array out That's what these two blue levers would do And the whole array would pop, I don't know But if you needed to really get in here, clean it good That is something you can do Generally speaking in the Dell's, orange has meant something You can hot swap So you can actually just pop the lid on this While it's running, drop these fans in and out Blue, don't take the blue apart while it's on and running That would not be a good idea Now, hidden over here We do have a couple SATA connectors And I didn't have one handy But these probably would support probably a SATA DOM If you wanted to hook it up that way I put this little USB thumb drive in there And that's reloaded operating system too Now the back plane over here with the two drives That are hidden back here And we pop one out real quick It is going through the back Ideally these are good SSDs for loading up your OS on And you can set this up to a mirror over in the back And you know, your mirror, your OS drives are usually Not having as much read and write going on For the boot Let's say you're running this as either a VMware server This case we're going to be using Freenance or XCPNG You could have a couple SSDs mirrored back here And that's solid I wanted all the drives available so I was using this Now this is facilitated and hooked up This back plane and the front Is all hooked over to this perk controller And this particular model is the Dell HBA Mini 330 Now the importance of that It is passing this through Something very important for Freenance Is that it has direct access to drives If you virtualize them or some trickery Where you take a different controller But set each drive to its own individual And pass through each drive But it passes to your RAID controller Freenance doesn't have direct access That's not the ideal situation With this there's no RAID configuration at all going on here It's passing all 26 total drives on here Right through to Freenance and 27 If you count the USB drive right here Now here as you can see When the airflow goes down Also catches on this little part right here And it's kind of hard to see As you took this out But this is the SFP plus Two 10 gig SFP plus Intel With two 1 gig connections So we have dual 10 gig SFP plus connections And two 1 gig connections on here Now let's also spin around And talk about the back of it real quick On the back of this unit We do have dual power supplies You can see the SFP pluses But all the way over on the side here This one right there Is the iDRAC And it's the professional version of iDRAC We'll talk about that when we go in there Having as its own separated Dedicated network interface Is really handy Because now it doesn't have to share with any of these It's separate You can have your own completely separate management network And that's for essentially like what they call Lights Out Management So from there We can actually turn this machine on and off Boot it up etc And control it and complete remote KVM console All from a web interface Which is nice Because that's where we're going to go next Now as far as loading free NAS in here That was pretty straightforward to do We used the virtual media I'll talk about when we get to that part How that works It wasn't that difficult to load free NAS You need to set the boot order to be this particular drive But it does support booting off of these drives Because they're all passed through individually So however you want to set it up It does support when you're booting with these drives Something worth mentioning If you're doing this If you're using these drives Because there's so many of them presented Installing free NAS EFI UEFI is the ideal way to do what I found out To make it work properly Without some weird drive configurations Where it doesn't know which drive to pick Because there's 26 of them And it sees it through the controller And tries to run through them That was a little bit of a challenge Just install it UEFI When you're installing it as a USB right here I chose standard BIOS install And then I went into BIOS and just said Boot off that drive And it worked perfectly fine Last little thing I'll comment on Is if you were going to do something along the lines of Pop this out Putting a couple extra cards in here Maybe you have some more tanky cards You want to put in or any other type of expansions It does have that ability here But make sure if you get one of these servers There are some connectors And we'll go back to the overhead real quick Connectors right here Hard to see on the edge But you get the idea There's a little connector that will go to power the card If you have a card that needs power But we'll go ahead and just snap that back in I don't have any extra cards Ordering this with the built-in Well integrated Intel one right down here It's just handy to do that That way I don't even have to do any adding cards Now this is also And I did a review of the R630 that we have And the 630 doesn't have as many expansion slots But if you're not going to use them You can save a few dollars sometimes and get the 630 You lose a little expansion slots But if you just need the 10-geek ports on the back You're good to go All right, so let's put this back together We're going to slide it in a rack And do the fun part Where we'll dive into the iDRAC Show the iDRAC overview Show free NAS running And of course benchmark it Because we want to see how we lay out 26 drives And what's some efficient ways to do that Before we dive into the iDRAC I wanted to mention Because this always comes up Well, how much was the server And where do I get it We, like I said, this came from tech supply direct And it is the Dell PowerEdge 730XD So you can spec one out for yourself right here The base price starts here And then goes up from, you know, depending on What kind of drives and what not Did you want to add it I dropped the settings in the cart From the specs on this particular server And we came up with about 45.99 But don't forget we have a coupon code For LTS services So if you paste that in and hit apply Goes down a little bit So you save about $450 with our offer code And this applies to whatever you want to buy from them And there's a lot of options You can buy the drives from them Maybe you have the drives already Maybe you only need some of the parts You need the base of the system But you have some other parts you're going to put together There's a lot of different things You can think about and do this But I want to at least show it out there Because this question always comes up in the comments Well, how much was it? Or how much is it exactly like you have And if we filled it out like this The only thing I didn't include in here Was the two rear drives that are in here I didn't see them in this particular list But like I said, you're looking at about $4,100 For this server Now let's get into the fun part of what can it do One of the things I really recommend And I did that in that build over there I really recommend getting the iDRAC Enterprise version Because this gives you all the bells and whistles When it turns to things like this And we're actually going to launch this And see it all set up So we'll hit launch And away we go We have complete remote control of it I would do this in my other part of the studio But with the system running It does produce a little noise So let's actually talk about how noisy is this thing When you first start it up It's around, oh I don't know 72, 73 decibels here as I have in my system Once it idles down And it's under lower load It goes down to about 69 or so So it's not incredibly loud But it's still a bunch of ambient noise I don't necessarily want in the background While I'm recording So it's in the other room And I'm back here in my office recording So it's not too unreasonably loud Now the nice thing is The iDRAC has the ability to not only Tell you everything on the screen here But also the ability to notify you So there's a series of notices You can set in here for different thresholds For alerts If you have a problem with one of the fans Going out Or one of the power supplies fails Etc, etc So all that information And can be programmed within here SNMP and alert settings And also by the way Because it supports SNMP You can also have this monitored by Other tools And Xabix might be an example One I've talked about before And there are ways you can have Xabix Pull the information out of here Via the IPMI and SNMP alerts So let's go down here I direct settings hardware Let's dive into the exactly what hardware is in this System CMOS battery good Fans Checks all the fans on here Tells you currently what they're running at Which we're not putting much load on here So it looks like we're running about 43% fan Processor wise We have Intel Xeon E5 2670v3 2.3GHz We got a pair of those in here Memory We've got DDR4 8GB sticks Totalling in 64GB This is ECC Because this is what people really want If you're building an enterprise type server Yes ECC is quite ideal Front panel Not much on there for the front panel information Because if you notice This is missing the usual display panel Once you stick all those drives in there For this particular configuration You don't get the cool little LED readout But I never really look at them As much as I look at this Or the alerts that may come out of here Network devices Here's our integrated Intel NIC I will expand that out And away we go We can see the link status One up and the rest are down I just have the 110GB port plugged in This also does support SRIOV So that is an option on this particular network card Which is a way to virtualize and pass through The network card to a virtualization system underneath We also have current wattage that's being used Input wattage, output wattage, firmware version These are a pair of the power supplies That are in there They are platinum rated in efficiency The 750 watt ones They do have a higher wattage one If you need it If you have different use cases And I haven't really messed much with this Maybe that'll be a future video But so far it seemed a little confusing There's both USB management And then of course the Dell V Flash Now when we try installing it using the V Flash Apparently I don't know what I'm doing I'll just leave it at that That didn't work as well I thought I understood it in concept And you're supposed to be able to put a little SD card in there With OS on there and run it Or potentially install it That doesn't seem to work as well as I thought So we'll get to how we installed it And there's an easy way to do it It just I thought this would be easier than it was If someone has a good article or write up on V Flash And they want to leave it in the comments below Or on the forum post I'll take the time to read it Maybe play with it later I just thought it might be easy to do But I was wrong Physical disks Well it's not easy for me So if someone can point out that You just don't know what you're doing Tom And I'm fine with that answer Physical disks So here's all the drives And as I said, there is no RAID configuration All of these are being 100% passed through To the underlying operating system Now this has And you can see these drives right here These are 12 gig a second That's the max supported on a backplane SAS 12 gig a second on here They're Dell branded But they're technically C8 hard drives Near 10,000 RPM So that's all these spinning disk drives And then we have the SSDs That we didn't install the OS on But we could have installed the OS on Actually they're solid state one All the way down here But they're only connected The ones that they Tech supply direct shift Were only connected at 6 gigs So plenty fast enough for SSDs Ideal for OS installs Especially you set them up in a mirror And you're pretty solid on them For that, for reliability And FreeNAS specifically Running FreeNAS even on a thumb drive Isn't that big of a deal Obviously, mere thumb drives would be better But FreeNAS on a thumb drive The OS itself is not right intensive But other virtualization ones Because of logging they do And everything else may be more right intensive So if you're installing this And we may reconfigure this with a setup for XCPNG Then it's more ideal to install XCPNG On to those drives in the back Because well, all the logging everything Is more right intensive A FreeNAS does have the ability to do logging On to the dataset as well We'll show that setup when we get this thing configured Now, when you launch the console here This is really nice Because when I can be in here doing this The other thing is the virtual media So we go connect virtual media And take a second We can choose and map the CDDVD file here This is how we loaded FreeNAS Like I said, I was hoping it'd be easier to the iDRAC But this is actually a pretty simple way to do it You go here, you find the ISO file Of what you're looking for And whichever ISO you choose to load You can copy it here And it loads reasonably fast It is using the network connection speed From your computer to connect it So if you are remotely doing this It's going to be a lot slower But I'm doing it local here And it's installed quite reasonably fast To get this done So installing was no problem Over this particular setup Using the virtual media We'll go ahead and close it You can also boot it off a USB And some of the other things There are other options for setting it up But now that we've got FreeNAS configured Let's log into it And we see it's at 192.1683.212 And what we have is no configuration Set up on the ship Okay, so from here we've got it set up And ready to add a pool There's no pool That's why the pool menu is Particularly missing from this We do see our 10-gauge connection here And I will comment that If someone wants to know a system data set right here It doesn't have a It's on the boot pool for syslog This is where you would change that To the other one on there So that's questions come up a couple times Let's go over to pools though And create a pool So add a pool Create pool These are some Seagate drives Or ocean doors as we started calling them We'll call it ocean door sass Check that encryption box I always like to encrypt all the drives If you get used to encrypting everything by default Life's just a little bit easier Now, if you want You could make this one giant pool That is a big discussion Let's break that out real quick before we do this Now, I've referenced this before This is a great write-up Right from the folks at IAC systems Of how the data blocks are written And how to make wide Or narrow different vdebs Whether you want to split them up Whether or not you want them to be all one giant pool There are a lot of options And these are all the considerations So are you optimizing for read IOPS? Read IOPS Streaming speed Streaming write Streaming read Storage efficiency As in when you go to It's not like just the triangle of efficiency Like I've talked about before If you really dive deep into it It is more It is trying to balance five factors All together of each of these One, two, three, four, five Different options and balancing them out So we won't get too much into it But we will say that After a little bit of testing I think what's a good balance for speed For this particular setup Is we have the 24 drives Is we're going to take the 24 drives Not like it's the leave-alink to this So you can make your own informed decision With the 24 drives Splitting them up into three sets of eight Seems pretty efficient It gives us a really good write speed If you give it a 24 drives And you get a good read speed With all 24 drives But you get a better read speed With when you break them up To the VDevs into three sets of eight So like I said There's a couple different scenarios I'm not going to dive into that in depth And I'll leave you some reading And I've done another video Talking about performance Now this is another cool feature That they've added in Freenas To make this easier So one, two, three, four, five, six, seven Seven, eight Whoops And then we set this to read Z2 Down here and we hit repeat Repeat two more times Yeah, because that's the drives that match Now we have these drives here Now we can make different decisions Of what we want to do with the drives This is where the synchronization comes in When you're dealing with ZFS and ZIL So if you were to go down here And we wanted to add a log drive The problem being These drives being that they're SATA Or sorry SAS 6, not SAS 12 gig And they're only SSDs Not MVMEs You really have to figure out Whether or not they're worth it To put the log drive in What that means is It will take the ZIL And be able to write it out there You do get When you have synchronous rights forced on You're going to get better Performance with it than without it But generally when you're doing it in an FS share It's better to have it Not having synchronous rights And it uses the memory to commit the ZIL And then write it there That does cause a risk And I'm not going to dive too deep into it But it does cause a risk of potentially Losing up to 5 seconds worth of data If there was a sudden catastrophic failure of the machine Like a sudden power loss to completely everything Ideally, if you're going to do these There's a whole article and a good write up here On Serve the Home About different drives you should use And why the older drives And with these new 12 backplane SAS drives that we have in here Even though they're spinning You're just not going to get much performance Unless you go with something like these Like higher end options They talk about Optane They talk about MVMEs You're going to need something a lot faster To really pick up performance If you want a full synchronization on there We're just going to go in Particularly for this demo We're going to have a synchronization Turned off when we set up our NFS But go ahead if you want to read I'll leave a link to this over on Serve the Home Where they break that down All right Now we can use these as caching drives They're probably pretty good as cached But we'll add them later For now we're going to build it without the cache And start running the benchmarks And we'll show adding the cache later So we have this all set and ready to go We did Z2 We have three sets And let's go ahead and hit create Create pool If you want to see what's going on in a background This is what it looks like It's creating the encryption Building all the drives And this is what actually gets stumped to the screen We'll just slide that back over And speed up through this And Frenas says download encryption key Don't lose that I've commented on this a couple of times I love that they make you download it To go further That's really important that you have it Healthy 2.6 terabytes free Now I'll reference this real quick When you're building these out So when you do the ZFS build out on here And watch this thing just read Z2 So it matches We have drive capacity of 300 We have eight drives And number of rig groups is three Calculate So we come up with a similar number If we would have made these And we just said 24 and 1 24 and 1 Just so you know We would have had more usable storage But we would have lost a little bit On our read speeds because The way each vdev is set up All the data is striped across All these vdevs So this gives us better read speeds But the writes still have to commit To all the drives So each of the parity writes And that have to go on there Are sprouted across the drives But they still have to commit To those drives But when we read the data back We will get better read performance But like I said This comes down to some of the sacrifices You make whether You wanted to make it one large drive Where you have the best capacity Versus splitting them up a little bit But z2 means we can also lose Because it's z2 double parity Out of each of these And we'll go over here and look at them real quick We can lose a couple drives Out of each of these So we have a pretty good fault tolerance on there And there's If we have to rebuild the data It's only going to tax these particular drives To really rebuild the data on this particular set Because each one of these Is its own read z2 vdev That makes up this entire pool And like I said I'm not going to dive too deep into every scenario For testing I just don't have the time to do it But we'll say that this is pretty adequate And we'll jump on those tests Now one of the things we can do here Is go over to the jails And we'll do our first test Choose cage for jail Choose All right Then we go back over to our pools And there's IO cage Now I just did a demo on this the other day And this is what it was for Is to show you how easy this is to do I happen to already have On here the root At 192.168 Oh, 3.212 There we go And I have the foronix.zip file here Now we have to copy that over So cpforonix.zip To mount Chindore IO cage images Please copy that file over there It happened to be This is actually on the thumb drive So the thumb drive is the root of it And then mount ocean doors Where all those datasets are That we just built Then we go IO cage Import And it's the Foronix file here Importing Done And that's in real time It imports really fast There's plenty of power with this machine All right, we'll slide this out of the way We'll go over to the jail Go over here to jails And we'll go ahead and kick off this As a start job Okay, foronix is up and running So let's go ahead and ssh into that And run a benchmark Except for one so notice how fast is it P2 So foronix test suite benchmark PTS slash IO zone We'll choose a 64 kilobit We'll two gig writes And we're gonna do Test all options Just read and write on that We would like to save the results Yes Give the file a name And we're gonna give it the name of LTS Dell R730XD There we go, 24 drives 3x8 z2 vdev Overthought that All right, press enter And we'll kick off this and let it run While it's running real quick Let's go ahead and go here There's v1 And we'll watch all the write Spread across the RAID z2 drives Oh reads and writes And we'll see what kind of performance levels We get out of this All right, we like to save the test results Yes Yes Yes Go include everything Copy link And let's see what kind of performance we got out of this Not bad So 24 drives We're writing 906 Pretty reasonable there Here's our reads So you can see we're way up here on the read So this is with no other cash drives added Now I do have And let me pull this up over here This was a previous benchmark I did And this particular benchmark shows What the right I did have the log on there But it doesn't matter for reads Log is only for writing You can see the substantial difference this made So 1614 with 24 drives All one giant z pool And in here 24 drives 3 by 8s of d2 So 64k 2gig 64k 2gig Exactly the same test done Exactly the same hardware Nothing changed here Other than the way we laid out the pool So you can I'll leave links to both of these So you can pick through them and examine it Now one thing to note If you force syncing on You went from this 913 write And this is with the log drive Versus We're about the same There's some levels of deviation you may get But with 24 drive vdev We're still at 906 write And that's still without a log But this is not with a syncing turned on So this is one of the reasons I had that If once you start turning on the syncing It's a challenge Like I said I'm not going to dive too deep into the Why or why not syncing You can leave it off and it's safe But read up on it So now let's test VM performance on here So we kind of get the idea of what it can do Read and write wise on here With the current setup Which is this one here 24 drives 3x8 zdevs We will go ahead and add those drives As cache drives though Cause there's some performance gain To be added by that We can We'll run one more test That actually will just run the same test again After I add the cache drives But for the pharaonics test It doesn't seem to make much of a difference It probably makes more of a difference Depending on use case In specifically cache Is going to be helpful A good use case would be even like My video editing setup on this With video editing Well you're going to Repeatedly pull the same assets And therefore if they get stuck On those particular drives It's going to be great But the other thing is This system has 64 gigs of RAM That extra RAM is going to help Tremendously with the speed Of frequently accessed files on here Especially over like an SMB share So let's go ahead and extend the pool real quick We'll go ahead and add these two drives As cache Extend Confirm Download encryption key This is something of note When you change the drives around The encryption keys get updated It has you downloaded them again So now we have And we'll go back over here to status The two cache drives down here So plenty of cache now Plenty of memory And we'll run that same test one more time And we're only We're just going to do the same test But we'll only really need to check it for Read performance To see if that made any difference Because these are read cache Not write cache Option two Option two And option two for read Yes And you do have to give the results For all the same names So let's go ahead and do that real quick That way it should append to this one And cache drives All right And let this kick off This should run fairly quick And we can see some of the cache hits here We'll see if that gives us more Gives us much of a boost in terms of performance though Because it's not The goal of this When it's doing the reading Is to exhaust some of the caches One of the pharaonics running But it doesn't know that ZFS is going to Fight against it For those cache hits So hopefully we get Based on the file system we're using It probably would vary a lot more On the pharaonics test Now that we have the cache If we use different sizes In the test options So using a file size of two gig Versus one of the larger file sizes May make a little bit more difference And of course when you start talking about VMs Or even video asset files on there If they get hit on the cache They're generally a lot larger When you have a large video file that you're editing So the cache will benefit It may not be a dramatic difference In this particular test though Okay yes Up below the results Yes, yes Happy link And maybe a small boost from performance But it's within the deviation here So even with the cache drives Like I said I didn't expect it to do a massive performance boost But you know maybe there's a little bit So we get 31 here But we're still within the deviation That is something that The system caching it And this is where the pharaonics is going I think there's some wild numbers going here This is what this means So that's the deviation it had on a drive Still an impressive performance on In terms of read performance on these drives And I didn't test the right Because it's not going to change much All right now let's actually throw something On here And I'll see how it performs In terms of a rewrite performance Using it for IO For a virtual machine So I have this NFS share built and ready On XCP and G's already mounted to it Already copied some things there I will show the options and yes Sync is disabled as you should On an NFS share to get any real performance out of it And I have a few things running And I already got them running in the background here So I've got the pharaonics just Beaten up on the system right now You can see all the read and writes going across here We can see that the cache drives are being used as well And what I wanted to show was not just a specific performance Although I did run this And this is I'll leave a link to this one as well Here's what it looked like running inside the jail On in IO cage directly on the server This is a date WNVM running on XCP and G But using this free NASR73 as a storage server And you get these because of the caching Some really crazy numbers in terms of read performance But the right performance is writing out At about 450 here so not bad And what we have here is me running several VMs And doing several pharaonics tests And a windows test in here So I wanted to see how many IOPS you could get out of this So peak data IO throughput was quite good here So you know 858, 778 So good numbers there But our IOPS were you know here We peaked out at about 24,000 IOPS And that's on the writing and on the read IOPS We're able to pull 19,000 And this is just back and forth windows running What do I have windows running over here to do windows lab tests And these are going to be skewed Because everything's writing back and forth at the same time I did this on purpose Because you get really crazy numbers inside of VMs When you try to benchmark them They provide some data But they're hard to get really solid data But by running these benchmarks And of course you're never running a single VM On a single storage Or maybe you are But generally you build the VM and have lots of them running So by setting up a couple VMs running We're able windows is surprisingly able to write really fast on To this particular drive And then pharaonics running in a background over here Oh, test accident with non zeros tasks Sometimes there's too much deviation It fails not because it failed to write It just because the deviation seems too much With all the different loads going But you get the idea by looking at the back end here When we go back over here to Do Storages Look at the lab and the stats That's why I jumped over to here for that So you can see that we definitely get really good performance With only a single 10 gig So this setup is There's this is running on my Dell servers Or in the back it goes through two switches Which shouldn't really cause any problem But they do talk at 10 gig This is not more than 10 gig though It's only 10 gig So that's why I ran some of the first benchmarks Running inside of a jail Inside of the free NAS directly As opposed to using it as an attached storage But likely when you're using free NAS You're going to do it as an attached storage But you can see there's you know Plenty of performance to get out of this machine So benchmarks based on this configuration That's what I wanted to share And you know to kind of show its use case Are it in things And thank you for making it to the end of the video If you like this video Please give it a thumbs up If you'd like to see more content from the channel Hit the subscribe button And hit the bell icon If you'd like YouTube to notify you When new videos come out If you'd like to hire us Head over to laurancesystems.com Fill out our contact 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