Hey all,
As stated, I have somehow acquired an entire DL380 G9 for $150 CAD in basically never-used condition and both Xeons present (There is aesthetic marks on the chassis, but actually 0 dust inside. It’s also lacking RAM).
I messed around with a couple of these things in college, but it’s been a bit since I dealt with the hardware side of servers and setting one up from bottom floor, so I just had a few questions if anyone wants to offer advice.
There is only a single 8 drive bay installed on it currently, and it does not have all of its caddies. What is your go-to place to source drive caddies or additional bays if needed? I’d also be interested in hearing recommendations on suppliers of 2.5" spinning drives, RAM, and power cables.
Back in college we used to put ESXi on these things, but after looking it up I can see that there is no longer a free edition. Is Proxmox the de-facto solution for bare metal hypervisors theses days? Either way, if anyone has any videos covering the process for installation on this hardware, I would appreciate it (though I can probably sus it out with enough time as well).
Finally, server racks are absurdly expensive of course. Any suggestions on DIY’s for a rack would be appreciated.
Glad to answer any additional questions if needed - thanks for your time.
I use ebay. Not sure what the market is like in Canada.
Proxmox is great. If you ever used vCenter, you should pick it up no problem. It’s just Debian, so stick the installer in and point it at your boot drive.
Unless you have the space and need for a rack, I’d skip it. It’ll run happily no matter where you put it, in any orientation.
If it doesn’t have the iLO license, you might be able to get one from ebay as well. I’ve done that for Dells. Pretty sure it was just an outsourced Dell support tech making a couple bucks by abusing their access to the license generator. Certainly not legal, but it works just fine.
That’s great to know, all four of my other machines are running Debian right now so I should have a pretty good idea of what’s up!
That probably is what I will do for some time, leaning it gently and securely against a wall somehow, but in the future rack would be nice - especially if I find some enterprise firewall for sale or something.
Also really happy to hear ebay might have iLO licenses - I have grabbed a couple one-time licences off there for windows machines before, but I didn’t know they sometimes had stuff like this too.