Dont worry my starter build has 32 cores 64 threads 128gb of ram and 7.2 tb of nvme ssds

Never use dell it's absolute trash,

Go for supermicro

Unless you get your power for free (or a free rack server), you’d be better off just building a tower to start with more modern, power efficient parts.

Also, you didn’t mention if you had a rack, if you don’t, definitely avoid rack mount servers for now.

Do you have a workload planned for that? Like everyone told you here, it's a powerful beast but you need to feed it. If you're planning to run a plex container and a file share, it's an overkill. Get a power efficient optiplex, or hp prodesk/elitedesk, or Lenovo Thinkcentre. Put all the ram you can, a fast SSD and a big HDD for storage, you'll be more than content, and without the guilt of killing 5 whales each time you read a pr0n file.

Savemyserver is having a black friday sale today. I just bought a 730xd off there for 280$ and a ram upgrade to 128GB for 100$ so newer hardware with comparable memory and a better upgrade path for almost the same price. I'd recommend checking them out.

Rack servers like the dell r720 are nice platforms for passively cooled Nvidia tesla gps’s if you’re into ai/ml…

It’s not a lot of money for a whole lot of fun.

Ok it’s loud AF. So put it somewhere you can’t hear it.

It also uses a LOT of electricity… so why not schedule uptime and have it shut off when you’re not using it? (Remember even at idle it’s prob using 120 watts).

I think having this is as much about the learning experience.

i just got one as an upgrade from my old desktop, i love it! little loud on startup but with 20+ services and 4 vms running it’s stays quiet, and it’s only using 168w

• Starter
• New
• Starting to learn
• Newbie

All keywords that highlight why all you need is to find some free hardware to get you going, and look to buy when you have a bit more if a grasp on what your requirements are

There is no such thing as overkill. You need for reasons!!

Don't make the same mistake that so many of us did. Don't start with Enterprise hardware. It's not made for us, put this $400 into some half decent consumer hardware from eBay.

No server is overkill If you want it can afford or and can deal with the Energy consumption

Good starter build :)

Probably overkill, but look at that price!

I have 3 servers. 2 R620 and 1 R630. The fans are loud before post but after they are quite quiet. I have them in my garage so noise/heat is not an issue for me nor it the power consumption. If I were in EU that would be a different conversation. I run Proxmox on them in a cluster and nested 7 ESXi “servers” along with a bunch of other LXCs and VMs. I don’t think it’s a huge investment for less than $400. You could flash that H710p to IT mode and have the TruNas ( or any other one ) manage your HDDs.
Also at the same time reduce the fan speed. You can have so much fun and functionality with it. Keep in mind the everything resides on 1 physical server and you will not have any redundancy. However, Proxmox, ESXi and the like need at least 2(+ witnesses) or 3 to allow you High Availability ( HA ) and to be able to move your VMs. Having 1 hypervisor on the bare bones and nesting ( installing other Hypervisors) under it you could create a hell of a lab.

Nothing is overkill. I’d say go for it!

It's a really good starter kit as it will quickly teach you to choose the next hardware properly, i.e. to balance the need for cpu power, ram, hdd sizes with the power consumption cost.

In terms of starter rackmount this is a great one. I started with an R710 a few years ago as I needed more processing power than a traditional tower offers. Few years after that I got an R720 for work in my colo.

Two great servers!!!

I asked the same and was met with a lot of “do it in a laptop first”. Ended up buying a r730 for $350.

Also everyone saying this thing would be an aircraft in terms of noise and heat. Its running quieter than my main pc or a regular ceiling fan. The fans stay around 5% unless you’re booting it. (Look up idrac fan control). Its uses more power than a laptop, though. Averages at 73w. I’m very happy with it. Running LXCs under proxmox with jellyfin, arrs, pihole, truenas, tailscale/cloudflare and some other random VMs for fun.

I would love this rig except that DELL runs PERC on all of them, hardware raid is not your friend with Proxmox

If you have something laying around, you should start there until you know you’ll need more power/functionality. I got into homelabing/self hosting with two of these r720s I got for free. They’re awesome. I’m running multiple VMs, lxc containers, a NAS, and my power consumption is about 175 watts per r720. But my power bill is $0.11/kWh.

Overpriced for R720. At that price you can get 730 or even 740 which will be more compute dense and have ddr4 memory.

There is no such thing as overkill!

I have this exact unit in my garage just with less ram. It is the center of my home lab it runs half a dozen vms and several other things and even has gpu support. It is an expensive work horse power dies have a price though. I have invested in a rack, switches, 10gb network and more. I you do get it start small and explore its true VM power. And find a home for it that is outside your living area.

All you need is a NUC running ESXi lol

My core i7 64GB NUC from 2019 has been doing great and isn’t seen on the electric bill or in my office. Get a little 4 bay QNAP or Synology to practice with data stores.

Well, R720 is quite old. I would look into R730/R630 options. Or ideally, use some hardware that you already have. An old laptop with Proxmox might very well be a start.

I would go for an old pc or just an intel nuc with proxmox to start. Calculate the power costs for a server like this before you buy it. Also they can be REALLY loud