Looking for advice on buying a few home lab servers. I’ve got some specifics that I’m looking for.
Mostly this will be used for building rke2 clusters, KVM virtual machines, PXE booting and other assorted testing items. This is my reason for needing something that can have 64GB of RAM or more, and the need for remote access to the BIOS (IPMI, iDRAC, Intel AMT)
Currently I have 3 SuperMicro servers that are about 10+ years old. They aren’t up to the task for the rke2 clusters and most can’t be stuffed with 64+GB of memory.
One thing I considered is getting a laptop with a damaged screen as long as it has the Intel AMT option. I’ve got a Lenovo P50 that is working really well with the remote desktop via AMT (and meshcentral). But the only few I could find online were really expensive. There is also a few models of Intel NUC that looked interesting, but all of those were $600+ and didn’t really seem worth it.
Budget: Ideally I could find something for $500 or less. But I realize that might not be possible. Something used, scratched and scuffed doesn’t matter to me. I’ll populate my own drives in it. Ideally something pre-build but I’ll assemble if it saves some money
Needs:
64GB+ RAM
IPMI/iDRAC/Intel AMT
2 Drives (SSD/NVMe)
2 NIC’s (optional)
No external power brick (optional)
Smallish form factor (optional)
Doesn’t matter:
Fan noise doesn’t matter, it’s in the garage. Currently have 3 SuperMicro 1U’s always running
Power consumption doesn’t matter unless it’s pulling more than an electric furnace.
Doesn’t need to have a bunch of disk trays. As long as I can mount 2 somewhere that’s sufficient.
I think you have many options, I recently picked up a HP elite desk 800 G5, they go for about $200 on eBay. You can get them with an Intel i7-9700 8 cores, and they can go up to 128gb of ram. They have 2 NVMe slots and 1 x16 pci and 1 x4. They use very little power and have 3 SATA ports too! For such a small footprint they pack a punch. Maybe you could find some with vPro?
In the past I had some Dell Optiplex 5060s but they max out at 64 gb of ram.