I’ve been using my little Beelink SER MAX for my proxmox (virtual environment) setup, but it was limited with space and power. I decided to buy an old server – Dell t7810 from amazon. Dual Xeon 2690-v4, 128gigs of DDR4 ram and a basic video card – just add space/config and it would be good to go. First I did some cleaning of the cpus and applied new thermal paste. I was going to replace the cpu and case fans, but that will probably be a later project. Second was general cleaning of the case, lots of dust inside and out was there – went outside and used my rechargeable “blower” to clean. I assume the “Chia farming” meant that multiple hard drives where used to “mine” crypto. Doesn’t tax the cpu’s at all. My plan is to make this the “VM farm” and remove Unraid out of the equation. This blog and family photosite (jellyfin) are housed on a physical desktop. Dirty cpu/heatsink below.
Clean now, both heatsink and cpu. 99% isopropyl alcohol and coffee filters do a good job.
Added 2tb ssd,2tb nvme, 500gb SSD (proxmox install), 2tb platter drive (7200rpm WD black) 2.5gig nic.
The Final build. Running CasaOS, Kasm, and Windows11 vm currently. Also attached my unraid server as a location for data/isos/images (unRADNFS).
Ran prime95 on the windows vm for shirts and giggles… Before and after.
Speedtest from the server itself.. yes you can do that via command line.
I’ll probably add more memory, a newish gpu (will probably do some GPU passthrough for gaming/plex), more SSD space, and another 2.5gig nic.