Hi guys, I’ve watched Level1Techs for a while now and lurked in the forums when I built my FreeNAS box using the Asrack x470du-2t. This place has been incredibly helpful and a great resource.
A little context for the situation. I would say I have a intermediate amount of technical ability and my current profession opens up a lot of doors in many different technical spaces and I have had a blast exploring them. Recently I went to a course that was an introduction to Linux. I am by no means a linux guru but I’m looking to change that as well. However, I knew enough to breeze by and had a lot of time to talk with the instructor who has become a friend and great mentor. He introduced me to the idea of self hosting and level 1 hypervisors, so much so I went in during my days off to learn more and bounce ideas off of him. I was hooked and I knew I was in for long nights of banging my head against the wall and explaining to my significant other what a 15u network rack and 42u server rack were doing in the bonus room. Also why the internet was intermittent recently. (messing with pfsense and surricata, lol)
I wanted a virtualization server so I could start learning as it translates to my current profession (kind of…lol). I started off looking to build my own which seemed like a good option as I enjoy the building process and finding the right hardware, but soon realized I was going to be making sacrifices on certain things. For example; If i went with consumer hardware I IPMI with pcie space to grow was incredibly limited. I should mention here I wanted an AMD machine. My first build was with AMD and I like a good underdog story. Anyway, I decided to go the full enterprise route. I know I will catch some flak for not buying a used server on the cheap, more on that later. I wanted something new that was today’s technology to learn on and to hopefully grow with as one day I hope I can take this machine from a homelab setup to a production one. The use case for this machine is vast as it is more than capable for almost anything I can think of throwing at it. I was also given a free server after ordering this one from a friend I recently met through work. It is a Dell C2100 with dual x5560s. I now have the opportunity to work with old and new which I couldn’t be more excited about. The questions I have are the following.
What are the nuances the uninitiated might face with new hardware specifically HPE? (I found out recently about the premium for memory, storage, and what I assume is any other hardware going into this thing.)
I’ve looked around at compatibility charts for memory and such, is it necessary to use the SMART hardware from HPE?
Opinions on hypervisors? I have a feeling the HPE may not like proxmox since it’s not supported(I have the opportunity to double the fun as well as the headache.)
I have the two friends I mentioned before to help me along the way but, they are newer friends with priorities of their own and I hate to be intrusive so I rarely ask for help outside of being in the same room. So where can I go for support and to generally learn how to use this newer machine?
I know I sound a bit naive and I admit I vastly underestimated the difference in enterprise systems vs consumer, but I like a challenge and am eager to learn about something that a few months ago I knew almost nothing about. I’m sorry for the lengthy post, I have trouble putting thoughts into text sometimes. I hope I offered enough detail to those who read it, and if I didn’t just let me know. I’ve got thick skin and am open to constructive criticism, I mean this is the internet right? Thanks for everyone’s time and input, cheers!