I have aquired an Asus Z8NA-D6 dual socket mobo and picked up a pair of Xeon X5675 cpu's...... its all from about 2010 but I have one question.... what can I use this for? lol I have a couple of GTX660oc gfx cards kicking around as well. Never messed around with server grade stuff. Would it be suitable to do stuff like photoshop and premier pro videos etc or would it be more suited to turning into a raid server for file storage and movie streaming? My main gaming rig is what I use primarily for pretty much everything but I thought this may be fun to play around with.
Anything that's multithreaded would love it. 12 cores/24 threads of power there, just needs a pile of ECC RAM & some SAS drives and it'll fly. It'd probably take ESXi and make a good hypervisor for learning
Server grade hardware isn't really magical (apart from the proprietary hot-swappable stuff that lets you pull CPUs without shutting down first), what makes it 'server grade' is the support contract that lets you call a guy up and have replacement parts onsite within a day (or within the day for the big bucks). For most practical purposes the Xeon X5675 is an underclocked i7-970, and the SAS drive (assuming SAS-2) is basically a SATA3 HDD. Any single-threaded workload is going to limp along on that, so probably best to stick to highly threaded workloads (e.g. web hosting, video transcoding, very light VMs) and probably stuff that gets run rarely rather than constantly due to the high power consumption.
Im dragging this back again now... I have just acquired the server that the original board I talked about came out of. Unfortunately the board I had was dead, so here I am with the new ( for what it is) one. Its a complete server with hot swappable drive bays, Raid Card, 4 hdd's in it, 16gb of ddr3 ram per cpu etc etc etc. It was running upto about last week at work, I say running, more chugging along with the primary OS drive falling over every now and again with windows server 2kdark ages on it! Things I am going to do: Clean it! maaan it was dirty inside! Replace the OS drive with an ssd. Replace the cpu's with my ones. Nuke all the drives. The data thats on them has been pulled off and is no longer needed. Learn Linux... lol What I want it to do: media server and file server are the main requirements. Plex server to feed my movies around the house. dont think I need the drives in raid as its not important stuff that will be saved on there, just movies and music mostly. Home automation maybe - just a few things at the moment in the house, light switches, garage door that kind of thing. Cctv recorder. I am looking to install cctv around the house ( all hard wired and POE) Added stuff: We are renovating the kitchen and I want to put in a touch screen powered off an RPi4 and would like this to be able to access plex and spotify as its primary uses ( putting in ceiling speakers etc) but I would also like this to be part of the home automation stuff ( may endup putting all that in the RPi if the server isnt doable) Been reading up on the server side of stuff and I think I could bumble my way through getting it working on Ubuntu and running things like plex in dockers etc but some of the stuff I have zero idea on and even if its possible on a server. I currently have my network behind a Pi-hole and would like to leave that in place. This mobo also has dual network ports. Can this be utilised in some way to do specific things like one LAN and one WAN? Can all my ideas work off one box at the same time etc? oh and I am an absolute linux noob! I can install it, ssh into stuff and the general basic basics but its one thing I want to learn hence me looking at mucking around with my own server and RPi's
I sure hope you didn't spend a pile on it. It's really old equipment, and very power hungry. What I would suggest would be to turn it into a Hypervisor such as ESXi. That way you can spin up a few different VMs and do some learning. The dual LAN ports can be configured any way you want. If you did do the Hypervisor thing, you could create a VM, and install a dedicated Firewall OS on that VM, assign the Network cards to it, and do some firewall learning as well. I have a couple different Sophos Firewalls running on different VMs for testing, and learning. One thing to note is Server Mobos are not as forgiving with the processors that are installed into them. A lot are hardcoded in their BIOS with the microcodes for the processors they support. My "Main" server at home is a SuperMicro with 2 Xeon 5690s, and 48GB of RAM. It runs everything in my house. Firewalls, File Servers, Exchange 2010 Server, Plex, and a small Lab for testing, and certification practice. It runs a mixture of Windows, Windows Server, Linux, Solaris, Sophos, and a HELK stack.
I didnt spend a cent on it... thats the best bit. not too bothered about power use. My main rig is on 24/7 along with every other device in the house.. lol Will check out those suggestions and have a play!
Oh nice! Free is always the best price. Enjoy! I'm new to this forum, but have been an I.T. Pro for over 20 years. Feel free to bounce ideas or questions.
To be honest, with what you are looking to use it for you are better off buying a Synology NAS, a fraction of the space, power and noise plus a LOAD less headache. A 2 bay DS218 is around £200 brand new and has built in apps for media, file & music streaming/sharing, has a built in IP camera app (you get two licenses with the device, you can buy additional camera licenses) and the right model (CPU dependency) can run Plex. It has a Docker function built in and you can also run it as your own personal Cloud server as well as home automation (Pi packages will run in a Docker container). The list of functionality available is huge. Using the DS Video and DS Audio apps (Android & IOS available), you can use any phone, tablet or PC as the "touchscreen". Save yourself the grief.
While I agree with your statement 100% I also know that building a system with "I'll fix that and it will be 100% the way I want it" has a strong appeal. Just know in your heart the system will only ever be able to reach 75% complete... While you didn't spend a penny, it will cost you in electricity... I am not an expert and barely a novice, just a guy with an opinion so reader be ware. I agree with RhinoFart that you'd probably do better with hypervisor. As a minimum you can establish two VMs, production and test. Then when, and I stress the when, you screw up and bring the system down you'll only be bring the test VM down and not your production VM (as often).
Thats the point of it though.. to learn on. Of course there are newer, better ways of doing things, as with everything in life. It cost me nothing, power consumption doesnt bother me in the slightest, learning factor is the biggest motivator for me here as im getting to the point of wanting another challenge to keep me occupied.
Unraid by limetech would allow you to do all that. Set it as the main OS play about with file shares etc and install plex. Unraid allows passthrough of GPU so you could even set up several VM's install plex in one. Then set up another for and make a gaming pc set up. All that can be done remotely so you can spin up VMs and try different things till your hearts content. As others said tho, its gonna sting you in power
well... Got all this up and running finally. Had real issues with the mobo that turned out to be a faulty cmos battery.. of all things. either way, its now up and running with 2x x5675's and 36gb of ecc memory. Installed Unraid and 10tb of storage to play with. Been playing around with dockers which has been fun. Also Ended up getting a full server rack with multiple switches, POE switches, patch panels, UPS and 19U server case. Had to remove all the hardware from the server case and put it in a normal size case that would fit into the bottom of the rack but I am on the lookout for a rackable case ( think I may of found some though) but overall the experience has been fun so far.
