• thejevans@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    My current homelab is running on a single Dell R720xd with 12x6TB SAS HDDs. I have ESXi as the hypervisor with a pfsense gateway and a trueNAS core vm. It’s compact, has lots of redundancy, can run everything I want and more, has IPMI, and ECC RAM. Great, right?

    Well, it sucks back about 300w at idle, sounds like a jet engine all the time, and having everything on one machine is fragile as hell.

    Not to mention the Aruba Networks switch and Eaton UPS that are also loud.

    I had to beg my dad to let it live at his house because no matter what I did: custom fan curves, better c-state management, a custom enclosure with sound isolation and ducting, I could not dump heat fast enough to make it quiet and it was driving me mad.

    I’m in the process of doing it better. I’m going to build a small NAS using consumer hardware and big, quiet fans, I have a fanless N6005 box as a gateway, and I’m going to convert my old gaming machine to a hypervisor using proxmox, with each VM managed with either docker-compose, Ansible, or nixOS.

    …and I’m now documenting everything.

    • Wingy@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I’ve had an R710 at the foot of my bed for the past 4 years and only decommissioned it a couple of months ago. I haven’t configured anything but I don’t really notice the noise. I can tell that it’s there but only when I listen for it. Different people are bothered by different sounds maybe?

      • thejevans@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I had an r710 before the r720xd. The r710 was totally fine, the r720xd is crazy loud.

      • MangoPenguin@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        1 year ago

        That’s crazy to me! I had an R710 and that thing was so loud. I could hear it across the house.

        For me if I can hear it at all when sitting near it in a quiet room, it’s a no-go.