Dell R430 for HomeLab

Buying R430

The chassis and core compenent

First I needed to figure out exactly what i wanted. Power consumption was at the back of my mind for wanting to be a littler greener and use less power, especially with the rising costs in the EU/UK.

I currently utilise a Dell R620 that i’ve had for a couple of years and have steadily upgraded to turn it into a pwerful box:

• Dual 10G SFP+ Intel X520 Daughter Card
• 112GB RAM - I do have another 16GB but Dell’s RAM configuration doesn’t suit odd numbers on the dual CPU - 1333Mhz
• 2 1TB Seagate Barracuda 2.5inch Sata SSD’s (Used for local VM storage - main VM Storage is NAS Flash)
• 1 500GB Samsung 970 2.5 inch SSD for boot drive
• HBA for the backplane
• 2x Intel(R) Xeon E5-2630L v2 @ 2.40GHz (6c 12t)
• 2x 750W Titanium PSU’s

This was an aging platform when i bought it in 2019 and using DDR3 RAM, so the RAM being 1333MHz was low end anyhow (1866Mhz would’ve been ideal).

I wanted something that I coud look to expand down the line, but be able to start out smaller, whilst still being an improvement over my current setup - i was looking into dell R630’s, brand new AMD Epyc servers from Supermicro, HP Gen 10 servers and above as well as looking at custom building a 1u AMD Ryzen system.

I don’t particularly need the increased amount of PCIe lanes on the XEON and EPYC, so a ryzen would suffice, as the primary role of this server is to be my virtualisation host, provided it can utilise 2 SSD’s as boot drives, 128GB RAM and a 10GB NIC, i was happy for anything to be used.

I was browsing ebay for DDR4 compatible systems and some Dell R330’s popped up. These were not quite what I was after as they were single socket so limiting my expansion capability as a hypervisor. Then I stumbled across 2 listings of the Dell R430. These were a reasonable price and not locaed too far away from where I reside.

One was up or sale at £139.99 with a dual CPU config already (high powered low tier CPU) and 32GB RAM, Unknown Dell IDRAC license, no blanks on the drives, the chassis was a little more scuffed - delivery free of charge

The second was for £189.99, single CPU installed - 32GB RAM, IDRAC Enterprise, 2 PSU’s, not as scuffed - pick up at Derby only. I preferred the second system even though slightly more exspensive as it appeared to be a cleaner system and i knew it was pretty much what i wanted. I offered the seller £169.99 and picked it up the next day.

Buying the extras - RAM / NIC

With the R430 coming with default 2 sticks of RAM, I knew these were 16GB Modules more than likely running at the lowest speed of 2133MT/s. Therefore the same night I bought the chassis, I started looking at RAM on ebay as well.

I’d seen a couple of sales but they were charging £25-£30 per stick of RAM until i came across two decent sellers.

• First seller
  • Firstly - SK hynix 16GB 2Rx4 PC4-2133P DDR4 ECC Server Memory(Ram) (1 X 16GB). for £16.50 a stick - snatched up two of these
  • Secondly - SAMSUNG 16GB DDR4 2RX4 PC4-2133P ECC MEMORY MODULE RAM. for £16.50 a stick - snatched up two of these
• Second Seller
  • SK Hynix 16GB 2RX4 PC4-2133P-RA0-10 HMA42GR7MFR4N TF TD AA - this was a little more exxspensive at £18.25 a stick, but multibuy meant it worked out at £16.42 a stick plus £1 postage per stick - totalling £17.42 With the above in mind, that means i’ve now got my 128GB Server in place for all my virtualisation needs

Now i just needed to find a 10GB NIC to chuck in. Different to the R620, this R430 has no place for a network daughter card (NDC), so i turned to looking at the PCIe 10GB NICs. I know and trust Intel for my network cards, specifically with working with them for a few years in VMWare and Truenas Installs - mainly due to driver support, but they also offer more performance over Broadcom - albeit marginally.

I currently have an intel X520-SR2 installed in my TrueNAS server, so figured i’d look to pick another up and chuck it in the R430. I can pick these up for as cheap as £35 on ebay, the issue I had was I needed a low-profile bracket offering, for it fit in the PCIe slot of the R430. After looking around, there were a couple that offered low profile X520-SR2’s but these were all priced a little higher at £65-75 depending on where you bought them from, plus the shipping as well. That doesn’t sound too bad, but I’d also need to pick up the SFP’s for these - these can be bought second hand, but they can be dodgy at the best of times (they often come with dirty ports on the Fibre end, of which I don’t have a fibre cleaning kit). So in the past I’ve ordered my SFP and cables from fs.com and would do the same again. A 10GB NIC which works in the Intel X520-SR2 is https://www.fs.com/uk/products/71385.html which costs £23 including VAT, plus shipping totals £53.16. That plus the SFP would be £100 all in.

I found a seller which had the NIC and the Intel SFP’s already as a complete set, apparently unused in its entirety. This costs £80, but in all would be much easier and require less waiting for other deliveries. Added bous was the genuiine intel SFP’s meaning compatability wouldn’t be an issue. This though was a DA2 card and not a SR2. Looking around there’s not much differece but the SFP’s that the card accepts and how you go about updating them, with this nic already haing the INTEL SFP’s installed already, I had no qualms picking this one up and using it in my R430.

Drives

Now, I already have an installation on my R620. This works wonderfully and causes me no issues, however its not optimal, only a single boot drive and the dual HDD’s. So I opted to pick up a couple of 1TB SSD’s to replace the HDDs, but also use as my boot drives. For this i shopped around - using PCPartPicker as my main source to see my options and also as a guide to compare prices (and previous prices). I wanted two 1TB drives for the capactiy to host a couple of local VM’s and CT’s without needing the NAS, so i could take the NAS offline for upgrades. This was criticial so I wouldn’t impact the home network and services such as CCTV operation and DNS.

Of all the drives, I wanted cheap, trusted and if possible some good IOPs. These were got going to be busy drives so the TBW didn’t matter too much, they just needed to perform good IOPs, so when the servers on the local storage was used, it would be up to the task. I normally use Samsung as they often have deals and have been proven to be reliable. They also have a good reputation for replacement RMA’s. After looking around at time of ordering, these were expesnive at over £80 a drive.

So i started looking at others and I opted for some Kioxia Excerias at £62.50 a drive off amazon. This was in-part due to Amazon having an offer on, but also Kioxia used to be Toshiba (they were re-branded in 2018 I believe when they split off to be independant of the Toshiba name).

https://europe.kioxia.com/en-europe/personal/ssd/exceria-sata-ssd.html

With this being said, i can now run my boot drives in a Raid-1 config meaning I only have 1TB of usable space, but both drives will be mirrored enabling me to suffer a loss of a drive without impacting the underlying host. I can then replace the drive and re-add this to the RAID config for it to be rebuilt.

I intend to stick with the same hypervisor OS which is Proxmox. I was considering migrating to VMWare as its what i use at work, but i would prefer the paid version and thats relatively expsenive.

I’ve used XCP-NG a couple times to try it out and see if i prefer it over Proxmox, but I prefer to use a KVM Hypervisor rather than Citrix where possible due to widespread support and functionality.