Server Rebuild

March 3rd, 2020, 02:52am

Server Upgrade

I recently ordered a bunch of parts to convert my R620 into a custom whitebox server. My rackmount cabinet sits next to my main pc and I honestly just can't handle the noise anymore. I previously had silenced all of the networking equipment in the rack (including the Dell PowerConnect 6224) by replacing all of the fans with aftermarket ones.

NEUTRON is Born!

Once upon a colocation I had a server named NEUTRON, said server was the most powerful computer I had ever worked with at that point in my life. Given that it was such a huge beast I had named it NEUTRON after the neutron star, the most dense material known to man. Such a name I once again find fitting.

NEUTRON Hardware

I have cobbled together all of the important parts out of the R620 and either purchased new or like-new used parts to fill in the gaps. The results of this build have been most impressive, with the dual CPUs idling at roughly ~23°C. That said, here is the final list of parts that went into the build.

Conclusion

After getting the new machine put together I did some testing with ESXi, but once again settled on using Arch Linux + KVM for the host OS. Given the new hardware I wanted to do some extensive testing and some of that would have been a bit hard running just a hypervisor.

Finally here are some pictures of the new machine.

And of course after getting the new server setup, I removed the R610 and R620 along with a 2U blank spacer from my rackmount cabinet and added in the new 4U. Hilariously enough, the loudest thing in my room now is the fan on my ODROID XU4.

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