Monday, April 6, 2020
Wednesday, April 1, 2020
Homelab buyer's guide - Rackmount servers
Buying second hand servers for your homelab can be confusing. The below table should (hopefully) shine some light on what is currently on the market. I've broken this down into four categories:
Outdated - Servers that primarily offer Space Heater as a Service. Most modern enterprise operating systems have deprecated the processors or drivers (although an argument can be made for Linux). These are the least efficient servers you can buy secondhand, and should only be considered at extremely low upfront cost.
Out of warranty - Servers that are past warranty but still supported by enterprise operating systems to an extent. Drivers are starting to become deprecated. This is generally the sweet spot in terms of cost to efficiency as IT shops start rotating these out for more modern hardware. Both low and high end processors can be had for a fraction of what they were new.
Hardware refresh - Servers that are still under warranty or capable of being under warranty, but are no longer sold as new by the manufacturer. Servers with flagship processors can be had for a good price, but higher end parts still have the enterprise premium as shops will try to upgrade to avoid a full refresh of their environment.
Latest - Servers that are being offered by manufacturer as new. These are the most expensive servers that can be purchased, deals are hard to come by.
Notes:
Dell generation is determined by the number in the middle. For instance, an R610 would be considered 11G, R620 12G, and so on. The AMD variants end with the number 5, such as the R715, or the R7515.
Lenovo changed the MX moniker to SR for rack, ST for tower starting with the Xeon Scalable generation, with a similar designation for Intel/AMD as Dell (0 and 5 respectively).
Outdated - Servers that primarily offer Space Heater as a Service. Most modern enterprise operating systems have deprecated the processors or drivers (although an argument can be made for Linux). These are the least efficient servers you can buy secondhand, and should only be considered at extremely low upfront cost.
Out of warranty - Servers that are past warranty but still supported by enterprise operating systems to an extent. Drivers are starting to become deprecated. This is generally the sweet spot in terms of cost to efficiency as IT shops start rotating these out for more modern hardware. Both low and high end processors can be had for a fraction of what they were new.
Hardware refresh - Servers that are still under warranty or capable of being under warranty, but are no longer sold as new by the manufacturer. Servers with flagship processors can be had for a good price, but higher end parts still have the enterprise premium as shops will try to upgrade to avoid a full refresh of their environment.
Latest - Servers that are being offered by manufacturer as new. These are the most expensive servers that can be purchased, deals are hard to come by.
Notes:
Dell generation is determined by the number in the middle. For instance, an R610 would be considered 11G, R620 12G, and so on. The AMD variants end with the number 5, such as the R715, or the R7515.
Lenovo changed the MX moniker to SR for rack, ST for tower starting with the Xeon Scalable generation, with a similar designation for Intel/AMD as Dell (0 and 5 respectively).
Outdated
|
Out of Warranty
|
Hardware Refresh
|
Latest
|
Intel
|
|||
Xeon
E/X 5500/5600 (DDR3)
|
E5
V1/V2 (DDR3)
|
E5
V3/V4 (DDR4)
|
Scalable
gen 1/gen 2 (DDR4)
|
Dell
11G
|
Dell
12G
|
Dell
13G
|
Dell
14G
|
HPE
G6/G7
|
HPE G8
|
HPE G9
|
HPE
G10
|
IBM M3
|
IBM M4
|
Lenovo
(IBM) M5
|
Lenovo
SRXX0
|
Cisco M1/M2
|
Cisco
M3
|
Cisco
M4
|
Cisco
M5
|
AMD
|
|||
Opteron
(DDR3)
|
Threadripper
(DDR4)
|
||
Dell
11G
|
Dell 14G/15G
|
||
HPE
G7/G8
|
HPE G10
|
||
IBM M3
|
Lenovo SRXX5
|
Monday, March 30, 2020
ESXi 7.0 Homelab guide and speculation
With the upcoming release of ESXi 7.0, there are a few major changes that are coming about:
William Lam mentions in his blog that 7.0 will no longer support vmklinux drivers, favoring the native driver model. What this means for homelabbers: No more support for community supported 5.x drivers (such as net-r8168, net-r8169, sata-xahci, net-sky2). While storage can be worked around to an extent (drop the drives you would have used locally into a whitebox FreeNAS server and serve NFS/iSCSI instead), networking won't allow you to continue with an installation. If your processor is still supported in 7.0, you'll need to add in a supported NIC, usually in the form of an Intel or Broadcom gigabit adapter. If you have USB 3.0 ports, you should be able to add a USB NIC from the VMware fling, just make sure you inject the driver into your image first.
Which brings me to my next point. Previously, VMware had announced that future versions of particular processors may not be supported in the future. If you're on Westmere-EX (socket 1567) or Sandy Bridge desktop (socket 1155), you'll need to either migrate onto a newer platform, or in the case of the Sandy Bridge desktop, upgrade to Ivy Bridge. I would also speculate that 7.0 will likely state that Ivy Bridge DT, Sandy Bridge-EX and Opteron 4th generation (42/43/62/63XX) series would no longer be supported in the coming >7.0 updates, but should still work on 7.0.
It's disappointing to see the Realtek and Marvell NICs officially dropped from community support, but its completely understandable. These network cards have been on life support since ESXi 5.5 was released. In retrospect, homelab systems using Realtek NICs have been doing so with a driver that was EOL'ed seven years ago. It's high time that we consider upgrading to something a bit more modern!
William Lam mentions in his blog that 7.0 will no longer support vmklinux drivers, favoring the native driver model. What this means for homelabbers: No more support for community supported 5.x drivers (such as net-r8168, net-r8169, sata-xahci, net-sky2). While storage can be worked around to an extent (drop the drives you would have used locally into a whitebox FreeNAS server and serve NFS/iSCSI instead), networking won't allow you to continue with an installation. If your processor is still supported in 7.0, you'll need to add in a supported NIC, usually in the form of an Intel or Broadcom gigabit adapter. If you have USB 3.0 ports, you should be able to add a USB NIC from the VMware fling, just make sure you inject the driver into your image first.
Which brings me to my next point. Previously, VMware had announced that future versions of particular processors may not be supported in the future. If you're on Westmere-EX (socket 1567) or Sandy Bridge desktop (socket 1155), you'll need to either migrate onto a newer platform, or in the case of the Sandy Bridge desktop, upgrade to Ivy Bridge. I would also speculate that 7.0 will likely state that Ivy Bridge DT, Sandy Bridge-EX and Opteron 4th generation (42/43/62/63XX) series would no longer be supported in the coming >7.0 updates, but should still work on 7.0.
It's disappointing to see the Realtek and Marvell NICs officially dropped from community support, but its completely understandable. These network cards have been on life support since ESXi 5.5 was released. In retrospect, homelab systems using Realtek NICs have been doing so with a driver that was EOL'ed seven years ago. It's high time that we consider upgrading to something a bit more modern!
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One of my older homelab hosts has been chugging along for a few years now. The Lenovo Thinkcentre M75q Gen 2 has served me well, and while ...
