My HUGE (but small) 1U Server Upgrade

I have been looking for some single use

server

s to replace my two and three u

server

s. These servers will need to be powerful enough to handle all my virtual machines running all my workloads and at the same time need to give me a little more redundancy than I have now my current servers use a total of 5u and if I can achieve that I can regain some valuable rack space so I think I might have found the perfect 1u server and hopefully by the end of this video I'll have one over two so dumb and so dumb before I start.

Thank you all so much and thank you for the likes and comments in advance because it really helps the algorithm, but a sincere thank you. for helping make this channel what it is today and thank you very much for joining my live stream if you want to watch it. I stream every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday on Twitch. I spend a lot of time answering many of your questions. So if you have any questions about any of my videos, I'd love for you to join in so thanks again and let's get into it so let's talk about my new servers over the last year.

I've been making great use of a pair. of my servers, but my virtualization workhorse has been my Dell r710. This server along with another handle many of my tutorials and many services that you see in my videos and some that you don't, and although this server has worked very well. I felt like I needed something a little more modern, a little more efficient and get some redundancy at the same time and for the last few weeks I've been trying to create a more robust solution than just one big server and at the same time I've been trying to consolidate some of space in my rack, this led me down the path of trying to find the perfect 1u server.

I even asked for their help on a live stream in those streams we talked about some of the different solutions and some of the possibilities. and even some of the challenges we would face with the 1u server, this led to conversations about ddr3 vs ddr4, integrated gpu vs built in discrete gpu, ipmi, multiple servers vs one big powerful server, custom server vs basic server, ssd vs mechanical sata. vs sas boosts fan speed and noise and even the dreaded amd vs intel conversation. This was a fantastic experience that allowed me to lean on you and the collective knowledge of the entire community to be able to draw on a full stack of knowledge to be able to I truly appreciate your commitment and feedback, so I've had a lot of decisions to make over the last few weeks while I could get a bigger shelf.

I'd like to make better use of the rack I have, so I set out to build a 1u server and then what did I end up deciding on? I ended up choosing a super micro super server 5018 r m barebone server this is a 1u rackmount system that has an lga 2011 v3 socket, it only has one socket but we will talk about that later, it supports many different intel xeon e5 2600 processors, already be it v3 or v4, but you will see that my pick below has the Intel c612 chipset and it has four three and a half inch hot swappable bases and it supports up to a terabyte of 2400 megahertz ecc ddr4 RAM and it has eight slots to fill, it has six USB ports and comes with a 350 watt power supply and there are also a few other extras that I wasn't expecting, but enough about the specs.

Open it up and take a look, so what's in the box when I opened the box, the first thing I saw coming was rails. This was a

huge

plus, this saved me between fifty and sixty dollars over purchasing rack rails that are only half as useful. I'm very happy with it so we have a lot of additional parts and here is the passive CPU cooler and then there is the server of course and this is what they call a basic server but it is actually very feature rich so after open the server, first thing. You see, this fan shroud now looks a little flimsy, but it is what it is, it helps force air over the CPU cooler, I guess as long as it keeps the CPU cool, I'm fine with that, so now let's install the CPU and What CPU did I choose with?

I went with the Intel xeon e5 2680 v4. This thing is pretty cool, it has 14 cores and 28 threads, it's clocked at 2.4 gigahertz but it can throttle up to 3.3 and it's got 35 megs of cash and I've been thinking about slowing down the CPU a little but we'll see if my workloads can handle it and I also think this CPU supports gvt-g where I can pass through the GPU to multiple VMs which could make for some very interesting VMs or even plex transcoding but we'll talk about that later so That next was my choice of RAM. I ended up choosing the Samsung 32 gig dimmers.

Now these attenuators are DDR4, they are registered, so ecc they have a frequency of 2400 megahertz and I chose 32 gig attenuators. So I got a total of 256 gigs, but you'll see why I only installed 128 gigs here, so after installing the RAM, the next thing was installing hard drives, so the first drive may be a little unexpected. I chose a sata dom for the operating system. That's because I didn't choose the traditional SSD for my OS drive nor did I choose the typical USB drive. I ended up choosing a super micro cedar dom for the OS unit. These sata doms are pretty awesome and it was my first time using them.

Or I have seen one in person, but this satadom is a

small

sata3 flash memory module, it is more reliable and faster than USB and this one does not require external power and you can know which ports to plug it into because they are yellow and yes it came. with a power adapter just in case, but this will run my server OS and I finally decided to use this because it saves some space, it's fast, it's reliable, it uses less power than an SSD and I really didn't have the space. Install an SSD inside the chassis and these drives can read up to 520 megabytes per second and just 95 megabytes per second.

Now it won't win any performance tests, but I thought it was a good option for my servers. The next step is refrigeration. system inside the server or just the fans, now it comes with four working fans and the two on the left are just dummy fans which baffled me a little and these fans when they start up are pretty loud like most servers but after of the system. post, it's actually surprisingly quiet so the next thing you'll probably notice is a pci express slot, so this is one of the downsides of having a 1u server: I only have one pci express slot that works and I have to use it with this riser The way this works is that this riser ends up blocking all other PCI Express slots due to the height of the single use server, so this riser prevents other devices from connecting using traditional methods and although I would love to have two slots pci express I didn't want to have another 2u server and maybe there is a creative way to use another one in the future so let's take a look at the back and here are the IO ports so we have a single power supply. serial connection which I will probably never use we have ipmi on the back here which is fantastic we have a lot of USB 2.0 and 3.0 ports and we have dual gigabit knicks back here which opens up some interesting possibilities for teaming or pairing and we have a port vga, which is good, but I will use ipmi after the initial setup and here you can see the single solitary pci express slot.

Next we will install all my units so we have four hot swappable dry bases, all with quick release. They feel pretty cheap but they get the job done and they come with these dummy drives that you'll have to take out and I decided to fill them with four one terabyte Samsung Evo SSDs which are pretty cheap at the moment, I went for the consumer grade ones. Because they are much cheaper, I get a five year warranty and I am comfortable with the redundancy that will be built into my raid that will be arriving soon and after installing them I ran into my first challenge: I bought and installed the wrong trays.

For this SSD, after installing the drives and aligning them, they didn't line up with the backplane, which makes a lot of sense, but I wasn't thinking about that when I was buying my adapters, so I ended up finding these three and a half to two and half drive bays that worked great, they put the connectors in the same place they would be on a typical drive and are made of metal instead of plastic so they don't absorb heat, so after doing that my SSDs went They lined up. with the backplane, oh and don't forget to put the stickers on and take note of your serial number, once I had all four units on their converters and then on their sleds I was able to slide them right in, oh and totally randomly , I took an extra one.

CPU because I heard some of the boards don't come preinstalled with v4 support so this is a 2620 v3 it's super cheap and really nice. I thought for less than $20 it was a good insurance policy in case I needed it. flashing the boards for v4 support plus it gives me an excuse to build another server maybe not yeah maybe yeah so back to the fans on the pci express device, I ended up buying a few more fans, albeit heavier ones, due to my mistake when placing the order. but they worked very well. Replacing the dummy fans was very easy.

I simply changed the rubber feet and put them in place. That's when I realized I didn't have enough fan pins. There is only one fan pin available towards the front of the chassis. another one next to the CPU but I had no extensions on hand and decided I'm not going to use it so I tied them together and we were ready to go so I decided to install my pci express device which I went with. the nvidia quadro p2200 i chose this device to encode batch video streams and even some flexible transcoding. This is a true 1u slot with two.

This was important to me since I didn't have much space after trying to install it. I realized. that the sata dom was on the way, luckily they provide two sata powered ports and it fit perfectly but I got it working and this was another reason I bought more fans because I wanted to blow out all the hot air and preserve the components. in this area it's great and after playing with this for about 10 minutes I finally got that satisfying pop when it clicked into place, then I turned it on to make sure everything was working and now it's done, let's close everything and it's done.

Time to turn it on and the first boot ran smoothly, it recognized the CPU, it recognized all the RAM and was running at safe temperatures. I recorded and tested the memory in advance because those problems are hard to track down later, oh yeah, and in case you couldn't tell from all the clues, I ended up buying two. I will have two 1u servers to add some redundancy to some of my services. This will allow me to run a proxmox cluster and possibly some ha with kubernetes, which is a lot more robust than the one I have now, so with these two servers in hand, let's install them this time.

I decided to change the rgb lighting for this update and as you all know green rgb offers better energy efficiency and purple rgb offers less. errors, I thought this was appropriate since I'm going to be decommissioning some of my older, less efficient servers and I'm also using ecc registered RAM so I'm hoping that will give me less errors, so this is where I'm going to fix these new ones servers. under my network equipment and as you can see I don't have much space left so I'm trying to make the most of it and here are the two servers that I plan to take down, the one above is the one I call photon this is my secondary approximax server that just runs a workload at the moment.

It's running some 24/7 streaming code for one of my Twitch channels and this will be reused in a future video. The one below is what I call the galaxy. This has been my main workhorse for all my virtualization as well as my Kubernetes workloads, it also runs virtualized Truenas and is connected to my disk array below, so now there is only one thing left to do: install These servers first had to install the rails, now that's it. It's been a while since I installed Rails and the last True Rails I installed didn't have any tools, but they worked great again.

I'm very happy they were included with the server. I thought for sure I was going to have to buy other hardware and then. To attach the rails, all I had to do was line up the new server and slide it in. Oh, I forgot to take off production. Installing the second one was just as easy as the first. You simply assembled the rails, install the rails on each side. and screw them. I ran out of cage nuts during this install so I ended up ordering some more, so when I install my new fixture on top of these two, I'll have to remember to install these cage nuts as well, hopefully, then just slide on the next one. one and it came out perfect the next peel it didn't peel as well, well, and I forgot to put thedrive labels on the second one, so I wrote them down to write down all the serial numbers before putting these servers to use and Now all I had to do was plug them in.

I thought this was going to be the easy part, but I didn't have enough ports on my UPS and the plugs were too high on the front, so I ended up unplugging the second power supply. my drive rack and my r710 temporarily, my next step was to install the network cables. I ended up buying more cat6 cables and connecting them to my patch panel and joining them with the rest of the cables. I needed two cables for each server, one for the main network card and one for the IPMI NIC. I may actually end up using the second nic for teaming or bonding, but I'm running out of ports pretty quickly once I plug it in, you can see the ipmi lights turning on so that's a good sign. and now let's turn these servers on, you can immediately see the nic one light come on and then shortly after you can see the satadom hard drive activity flashing and then all eight ssd activity lights flashing, that's pretty impressive, and what?

Whats Next? these servers, I left some clues, but in case you didn't catch them, these will be my new virtualization servers to control everything that the previous two were running. I'd also like to bundle these two servers together so I can move things a little easier than now and I have some plans for the old server so make sure you're subscribed to see what's next and that's what I've been working on for the last couple weeks, two big server builds, so what do you think of my server builds? Do you think I make good decisions? Do you think a 1u form factor is worth it?

Do you have any used servers? If so, please let me know in the comments section below and if you have any further questions, comments or concerns you can ask them on my live stream which is every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, I would love for you to join in and again, thank you very much for helping make this channel what it is today. I couldn't have done it without you and as always, conveying on my Scorpio friends, OMG I think you. I'm also blocking my bot. I love it. I hope my bot holds up. That code is mediocre at best, we'll see, buddy, Diddy 10 gifted, so oh my god, I can't even say hello. man dude thank you so much dude ps really man gorfy too you guys really don't have to do it but I really appreciate it thank you so much um jay