Repurposing work servers for a home lab

Hello everyone! I’m new to the forums and will definitely do some digging but I’m wanting to start the rabbit hole of building a home lab. I have zero experience with any of this and was looking for inspiration for where I can start learning.

I consider myself an empty cup on this topic and am looking forward to learning about the entire space!

I’ll be repurposing some older Dell servers that my company is going to decommission soon. One is running a Xeon E5-2620 v3 and the other is a Xeon E2224.

Looking forward to learning new things and poking about with different software!

welcome to the forum

you’d be better off not powering this one on

GREAT homelab piece

sauce:

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Best part about that older Xeon is my work paid $10,000 for that server in 2018. ><

I’ll take a look at the wiki and see what the E2224 can pull off!

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It’s a 9th gen Intel CPU, it’s not great by todays standards but usable and due to hardware design issues mitigations can kill performance quite drastically depending on workload. Make sure to run the latest BIOS and microcode.

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the E2224 is equivalent to an i7-4790 in performance
no firebreather, but pretty efficient with a 70 watt TDP

as a NAS with light virtualization or light virtualization server you can have fun

the E5-2620 v3 has roughly the same total performance but half the single core clock speed and half the RAM speed as the E2224 with a higher TDP

Could be fine if you aren’t runnin it 24 / 7, just don’t expect a good time virtualizing on it

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Appreciate the info! I’m definitely new to the enterprise space on things like this.

most people are
this forum is definitely the best meeting place for industry pros that hobby on the side

The E-2224 is grossly superior to older gen hardware as it was built with some mitigations in the silicon

plus it’s newer so more reliable (13th/14th gen escapade excluded)

I have a coffee lake HPE that’s being repurposed as a NAS.

VERY hard to beat at the price point.

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Agreed. This community is how I LARP with enterprise gear at home in my free time.

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