Why the Dell PowerEdge R620 Server is great for a Homelab - Hardware Overview P1
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- Опубліковано 11 бер 2023
- I walk through and provide an overview of why I think the Dell PowerEdge R620 is excellent for anyone looking to start or expand their homelab.
This is part 1 and provides a teardown overview of the hardware components and capabilities. Cheap entry point, easy to scale up with lots of room to grow makes this server a winner in my mind. Part 2 will focus on some remaining peripheral points and software capabilities
Thanks for watching!
Perfect timing to upload this video, Im on the tram right now carring a r620 across the Netherlands , just bought it but haven't opened it, thank you for the preview
Enjoy it. Solid server.
If only electricity wouldn't be so expensive... I would love to run everything in my homelab on these...
I sold mine yesterday because electricity in Italy costs 0.50€ per kwh. It's over 30€ per month
I did not realize electricity was that expensive there. I definitely get that. It costs me about 10/month in the US.
I would suggest looking into Intel NUCs.
@@afteryesterday8964 The new Latte Panda Sigma seems like a good low power homelab option.
in India costs $ 0.0024 per kwh. for Household
whats your current solution now then ?
I love my T620 because it can stand on its own and doesn’t need as many fans to stay cool. It has less noise and can fit any size pci. Paid $400 plus free shipping for mine and it was brand new with less than 10 hours of runtime on it.
NICE! I just got mine last week off of FB Marketplace. This guy showed a lot of love to it and was the best conditioned one I've seen. Had all the sleds, front panel and even the keys haha. Only $300. Plus the guy was nice enough to keep both PSU's in :P Very happy with it! Hope you have fun with yours too!
Just grabbed a t620 with 20TB, 256GB and loads of spares for about $300. Slapped in a hba, 2.5gb network card, nvidia gpu and hooked it up to my heath-Robinson storage array. Bargain :).
I've got one of these, great virtualization platform. Spec 2x E5-2670 V2 CPUs (10 cores each, 40 threads together), 128GB of ram, 8x 900GB SAS drives and a 2.5" Sate to boot off, runs Proxmox 7. Isn't on all the time, just used as needed. Would I recommend one of these for a homelab, definitely. Incidentally, paid £150 for the server, £56 for 10x used SAS drives, and £40 for a new 1TB Sata drive.
£56 for 10x used 900GB SAS drives sounds like a steal! hope that setup is still serving you well. just got my R630 a few days ago
Can I use a Dell PowerEdge R620 motherboard in a Dell PowerEdge R630 8 x 2.5" Bay 1U server chassis? Is there compatibility?
Is there not a part 2?
You think its still worth buying one second hand?
thank you . Very well explained. wonder what kind of graphics card have you got installed on this
It didn't look like he had one, and you don't need one for most applications. They're useful for accelerating video transcoding if you're running Plex, but that's about it.
How loud is it?
Great video, confirms my thinking to scale/ upgrade as time goes on with the r620. From the Dell website when I got my r620 I noticed esxi 6.5 is max version compatible, and I had issues anytime I tried running 7.x. Is there anything special to get v8 to work? Would it even be worth the hassle to upgrade when I have everything running fine on 6.5 for a few basic homelab projects. Thanks!
it can run esxi8 no problem. just look for the dell customized esxi 8 iso. filename i have for it is VMware-VMvisor-Installer-8.0.0-20513097.x86_64-Dell_Customized-A00.iso - be careful where you download it from!
I have a 630 and the only downfall is the iDRAC license is as expensive as buying the iDRAC...
Thanks for the great video! I just bought one a couple days ago and i bricked the mobo during the bios update. is there a fix i can do beside getting a new motherboard? iDRAC still works but its on the latest firmware and i can’t even get the r620 to boot
Sadly none that I know of. Best bet is to just pick up a new board. When upgrading firmware it's important to read the firmware release notes because some versions must be incremented instead of just going to the latest version.
You could try to find the bios chip and reflash it using external flashing tool.
One thing I'd like to point out is the intrusion detection switch on the riser is rather fragile. I have my servers on rails in a rack and I went to push an R710 back in without the lid on and the intrusion switch was sticking up enough that it was sheared off by the server above it. I had to buy a new riser card.
Do you happen to have the latest firmware update iso? I am unable to download and need to update my 3 hosts
check out this site - updateyodell.net/
Can these be used without having to have a rack? I know some servers can be ran that way and maybe just need some configuration done.
absolutely. i just wouldnt recommend running it on a carpeted floor. pvc shelving is cheap and great alternative!
@@afteryesterday8964 Is there a guide to running those and other servers without the rack? I know the power is often a connector we are not used to seeing.
My issue is how loud they are.
I would recommend changing the power profile to be performance per watt. It will drastically reduce the fan speed.
Are the fans required if you didn’t rack mount it, for example Could you just apply a pair of CPU coolers? It’s unlikely to be working hard in most home labs.
If it's just you in a room in your house, acceptable noise, after the loud startup. If you want similar processing power that's whisper quiet , consider a HP Z620 or Z820. Later version 2 machines (2013 bios) same CPU options as the Dell R620 and huge memory. Early ones are cheaper, but only use E5-26** V1 6 and 8 core CPUs.
@@Tom-bp6nomaybe. The heatsinks are different but it looks like it still has the 2011 Narrow ILM mounting. But I wouldn't recommend it as the chassis fans do more than just cooling the CPUs, they cool the ram, and any other components in the way. If you're not worried much about how tall it is. You could probably go with the 2u R720/R730
Using a power drill to loosen and tighten heatsink screws made me cringe.
If you do it on lowest torque setting you'll be fine
@@afteryesterday8964 Still... eek!
Ubuntu will not work if you don't have a matrox video card or a cpu with integrated video capability.
It is not meant for desktop Ubuntu!
You run server software on that, or an hypervisor and then you virtualize tje hardware
@@lepatenteux592 how does the hardware virtualization work?
@@bigloud7067 With any hypervisor/virtualization platform. My favorite one is QEMU-KVM on Linux, but you can use VMWare or anything else.
I run Unraid OS on my servers and virtualization is a breeze. You can even passt-hrough devices (such as a GPU, or even reserve some CPU cores for your VM only) pretty easily nowadays as it can be done in the web UI (before, you had to manually edit config files and reboot)
this is not true. you can most certainly run desktop ubuntu on this. the real question is why would you when you can run a hypervisor and get way more out of it then just one ubuntu os. run ubuntu as a guest on top of the hypervisor!
@@bigloud7067 This is a complicated topic! You can virtualise pretty much any hardware to run multiple VMs... You can also pass-through real hardware to certain VM when needed (like a GPU per example... you can not use it on the host system - it is called black-listing a GPU - , and forward it instead to one of the guest virtual machines for GPU acceleration...)
go with 13th or 14th gen servers, better to avoid 12th gen servers, almost all the the things were newly designed for 12th gen series, how to identify the generation ? R stands for Rack and T for tower, in 620, 2 stands for 12th generation server, if its 3 then thirteenth gen.
Avoid them because they had new parts when they were new? That makes zero sense, especially since spare parts are incredibly plentiful and cheap for these things.