 Tom here from Lawrence Systems, and we're going to talk about this Dell R630. If you want to learn more about me and my company, head over to LawrenceSystems.com. If you'd like to hire short project, there's a hires button up at the top. If you want to support the channel in other ways, there's affiliate links down below for deals and discounts on products and services that we talk about on this channel. And very specifically, this is purchased from Tech Supply Direct. We do have an offer code down below for LTS services. They get you 10% off of your purchase if you buy from Tech Supply Direct. And we buy quite a few servers from them. We've been really happy with Tech Supply Direct. The only thing is not all the servers that we bought from them have made it across the studio bench because, well, people are buying them and they frequently get deployed very quickly and always have time to review them. This one's going into our stack, so I have time to review this one and we do it reviewing a little bit more in depth because I have time to do different testing with a different software load on there. Now, we've actually heard back from a lot of you, the audience, that have bought from Tech Supply Direct and I'm very happy to report since we started working with them last year, I've gotten a lot of positive feedback. And that matters to me. I've had very... I don't think I've had anyone really complain. One person kind of complained. They said something was wrong and they shipped them a replacement part but that's kind of what you expect if something goes wrong. So, by overall, it has been extremely positive for the volume of servers and we do see people who use our affiliate code. So, the number of complaints is very, very tiny. Number of people happy, very big. So, we always keep an eye on our affiliates that we work with. So, I want to make sure that people are happy. I don't want to push a company that wouldn't make you happy. And we do use them ourselves. I'm very much on... I don't have offer codes for things that we're not using. So, that's important. On to the server here. This Dell R630, this is Dell's 13th generation server. This is outfitted with the iDRAC Enterprise 8 dual 750W power supplies. These fancy fans that I really like, these are a dual rotor, dual fan. So, you got a one in the front, one in the back fan. I think that's kind of cool the way these pop in and out. And the dual fan case one fails. So, really solid design here. This is dual processor with 128 gigs of RAM. So, we'll walk through the specs a little bit later. First, I want to just kind of talk about an overview of how the hardware is here. Now, the first question is, why not one of the R730s via 630? And one of the things we wanted was, well, we don't use this for the larger hard drives. This only has the two and a half inch hard drives in the front. And we only have four hard drives in here. This is going to serve as an application server for XCPNG for us. And storage is facilitated externally via FreeNAS, is what this will be attached to. So, I didn't really need the extra room. Second, with the 7 series versus the 6 series, you do get, when you have a nice 2U system, you can put a lot more cards in. Something we just don't need for this particular setup. Matter of fact, we're not going to be using any of the PCI-3 slots at all on this because it already comes with the daughter card on here. So, the daughter card in this has got two 10-gig SFP plus ports and two standard 1-gig ports. So, plenty of connectivity on the back without any adding cards being needed at all. And with the 120-gig SRAM, we can look plenty of applications on here. Now, when it comes to the configuration of this, it does have the optional CD-ROM slot, which is not in use. It does have, which is really nice, the slot in the front over here. That's going to be for an SD card for loading the OS. So, you can have the OS loaded on there. So, if you are doing this with full lights out management, you're able to remote into this, get the console screen, and we'll cover that when we get into the iDRAC part of this. But you're able to get all into this remotely without having to be physically connected to it, and we'll cover how that works. Now, let's take a quick look from the overhead and take a closer look at this. So, the dual processors right here are dual Xeon 2680 at 2.4 gigahertz. This is the V3 processors. We have 128 gigs of RAM, and the 128 gigs is DDR4 ECC memory. And let's take a little closer look at these fans. So, they come out and you get the fan on this side and a fan on that side. So, you have the airflow going through and both fans spinning at the same time. And obviously, they're really easy to swap in case whenever goes bad, you're going to notice and be able to swap it out here. This little plenum right here, which does come out, will reveal, as you can see here, it's just an airflow to push the air down, but make sure the air goes across right here. So, your airflow on these servers kind of follows in that pattern right there, across in it. So, it all just snaps in and stays nice and tight. The controller, the PERC controller over here is removable. This currently has the PERC RAID controller that connects here. That brings us to the front end, which is 12 gigs a second SAS and near line SAS. So, you have quite a bit of speed here. Now, this is the higher end PERC controller. And when we get into the finer details of it, we'll cover exactly how that setup works. But you have the eight, two and a halfs in the front and it's all controlled through this PERC right here. We do have USB inside of it. So, we have a little USB connector right here and a couple of SATA connectors that come around to the front. But like I said, they're not in use right now. It's as if you want to put a CD-ROM in there that would be connected over here via the SATA. But that's not in use. Power supplies are swappable, so we can wiggle them out real quick. But they're the 750 watt power supplies in here, 94% efficiency rating. So, this is a pretty reasonably low wattage server. Now, slightly hidden under here is that controller card. It's kind of hard to see it, but there's a series of heat pipes. And that is to keep the heat away when you have a 10 gig setup. It can get a little bit warm. So, they have the heat pipes in here to facilitate it. And that brings us around to the back of the unit with the two 10 gig SFP pluses. And there's only room because of these riser cards in there to cut this over this way. So, it's like I said, I can still put another 10 gig SFP on there if I needed to, but it's not really necessary. Now, with this particular controller, both of these and the way it's hooked up and integrated to the board can provide full 10 gig line speed with both at the same time. So, you have the two 10 gigs, no problem providing full line speed on that. So, that's pretty much it for the overview of hardware. And let's dive into some of the more interesting part with the software and how you configure it and how the iDRAC works. That's something really nice about these enterprise systems. Alright, so the server is all booted up and I'm logged into the iDRAC. Now, I didn't really show this in the back of the system, but the iDRAC is completely a separate network interface. So, we have the two 1 gig ports on the back and the two 10 gig SFP plus ports. And then off to the side is the iDRAC. This has the full enterprise iDRAC controller on there and that allows us to completely separately manage the system. And I want to comment on this. This is when we booted it up and let it idle down, not when it's at full fan, but when it's kind of, you know, under low power, low usage, you're looking at a 56 decibel from the front and 49 decibels in the back. So, that's with both power supplies plugged in up and running. So, it's not too loud of a server. It's actually a lot quieter than the 710 servers that I've done and a 720 servers that I've done videos on. So, reasonably quiet server, which is good. So, if you're wanting to use something like this in your home lab, this particular model is relatively quiet. As long as it's not under heavy load. Obviously, once you put under heavy load, that's going to go out the door. Now, this also has the full virtual console and HTML5. So, we're going to go over to settings. And I do recommend you check this because I noticed when I first hit it, it tried to launch the Java one. And if you're not familiar with it, it's kind of annoying and you got to do a little Java update. But it has the HTML5 virtual console. So, we're going to go here and showing you launch it, go launch. And this gives us easy direct access to the system without having to do anything special. I can go here and even remotely, this works perfectly fine. I've managed this over a VPN from my house even when I got a remote into a server. And if you need to reboot something, you can reboot the server and we'll go ahead and restart it. And it'll go through the whole settings and away you go. So, you do have the keyboard. I can do screen capture. And like I said, the protocols are using it relatively fast. So, it's even over a little bit slower connection. We're local here at the office, but over a VPN, this worked perfectly fine. So, you can get into all the BIOS settings, change all the settings around for the system and see what's on the screen essentially. And this is the actual boot up screen without anything plugged into it. Really nice feature and one of the reasons I recommend the iDRAC Enterprise. So, you get all this with it. So, while that's booting, and you can also refresh and just see what's on the screen. Just like no signal, refresh it again. And then it's going to get a signal on there and yep, there we go, shows what's going on. So, diving into the details, power, thermal usage. I said it was a low wattage server. I mean, it should say probably it doesn't need too many watts to run. So, right now, because we rebooted it, it's at about 112 watts. And that's, as you can see, it's going through and bumping up a little bit. But when it's just idling it, idle is just under 100 watts, about 98 watts of usage. So, relatively power efficient compared to some of the other ones that idle at almost 200-something watts. So, you're putting in CPU power and a reasonable wattage usage here. Now, the Dell iDRAC has all the other notices for alerting power and everything else, intrusion detection for the case. Note that you should know if anything came unlocked. It has full alert setup. And this is how we'll configure these. It has the ability to send either SNMP monitoring or email alerts. So, you can set up different alert destinations for both of these. And this is great because that way if there's any problem, if there's a hard drive failure, because we're using the PERT controller for the RAID array in this, if there's any failure or drive goes bad, it'll fire off an email and send it over there. Now, the CPUs, this is a little more detailed on these, the Intel Xeon CPU E5-2680 at 2.5 GHz. These dual CPUs per the PassMark score are 25, 7, 11. Obviously, it's not like the most in-depth testing of a processor. We're going to get you an idea of speed on there. I don't look at them as the end-all of a benchmark, but kind of giving you an idea of the kind of processing power these have. So, plenty of cores in here as you can see. So, great for the virtualization task that we're going to be using it for. Memory, like I said, 120 gigs of DDR4 RAM in here. And then the network device, the integrated NIC has all the link statuses in here. Take a second to load. You can see it's up. Now, these NICs are not just like the plugins where you have what you're adding card. These are a lot more extensive because they support iSCSI, FCOE, and PixiBoot. So, you have all those features on here. You can set these up as including as an iSCSI storage target. So, they have some extra options with this integrated daughter card that's on there. So, it's a nice feature to get that with it as opposed to just buying some off-the-shelf cards and putting it in there. Nice that you can add the extra NIC cards in there, but these integrated ones really nice. They tie right here into the iDRAC on there. For storage, we have the Seagate Nitro Drives. And this is configured in a RAID 10 with just one virtual disk. So, when you look at it from the physical disk standpoint, each disk, each pair of disks, I should say, these two make up the first part of the RAID 10. These are the second part and then the two together giving us a pretty reasonable speed on there. Plus, these SAS drives here are quite fast. And then they're not the Dell drives. So, that's one of the reasons, if you notice here, doesn't have. I'm assuming that's why it says unavailable when it says remaining rewrite endurance. That's something I've seen before. I believe it tells you that if you get the Dell branded drives, but these are Seagate Nitro Drives. But they work great in here, so no problem. But it still has at least some of the health on there. But RAID is not a backup, as I've reminded so many people. So, that's important. And because we presented this for XCPNG, it's just one drive and we loaded the OS and it'll partition out the storage. When I do the videos on that, I'll be covering that again a little bit more in-depth of why we did it that way. Because there's always a lot of people that have questions about that. But yes, this can do the rebuild and everything and letting it handle it is pretty simple because it'll give us sale arts. And it's pretty good performance if you get the Dell Perk controller that has the memory on there for caching. So, that's the controller that's on here. It's the one with the cache. And this is all going to be created and managed in here, creating your RAIDs. It's got the battery on there. So, and it's all monitored right here. And you can check the consistency rate, rebuild rate, et cetera. It's a nice solid system for managing it. But still for my overall storage, like I mentioned before, this is going to be where the applications live and the hypervisor lives. But the overall for any larger storage needs, we offset that to another free NAS system. Now, I'm not using it, but it does have, like I mentioned before, the SD card where you can set up OS's on there to be loaded to the machine. That way, if you ever remotely need to get in there and reload a machine, you don't need to actually get physical access. You preload it with the SD card. If you can get in there, as you can see, because you can get right to the console, the system remotely. So, this is in a data center somewhere. You can get it remotely, see what's going on. Reload it if you need to, and get things back up and running. Now, the last thing I'll leave you with here is people always ask, how much did it cost? So, you can head over to Tech Supply Direct's website, and I filled this all out. This is the Dell 13 generation PowerEdge 630, 8 bay, 2 and a half bay, 2 and a half inch small form factor 1U server configured to order. And I filled out all the configuration except for the storage to match. So, you have all the information right here. The storage is where prices can go, well, they get up a lot higher depending on your storage configuration. Maybe you don't need those SSDs, and you just need some less expensive spinning rust drives, but they're still going to have a nice 12 gig backplane. So, 2 times 200, or however you want to do it. If you even want to order storage, or maybe you have some storage you want to transplant from one of the other machines that you currently have, there's different options on there. Now, if we do choose the ones that I have, 4X 960 gig drives, I'll assume these ones are probably the Nitro. So, right here, it does, well, it bumps the price up quite a bit. But the good news is we have an offer code to get you a discount. You can apply it, check out when you go to purchase this. So, that's it for the review of this Dell R630. Leave comments, questions below, or join us in the forums where we can have more in-depth discussion on there. Tell me what you liked, what you didn't hate about it. I will mention that the Dell iDRAC, which comes with the iDRAC Express by default, 175 gets you to full enterprise, fully licensed one, like I have for this right here. So, that's a little box you can check that probably makes a lot of sense. Like I said, I like to be able to have the full management. But then again, if it's a lab and you're trying to do everything on budget, you know, take that for what it's worth and decide what you want to do. Just my suggestion. All right, and thanks. And thank you for making it to the end of the video. If you liked 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 page, and let us know what we can help you with and what projects you'd like us to work together on. 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