My server arrived today! How very exciting! A Dell PowerEdge R730. Here’s some specs for those that enjoy that sort of thing:
- 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2560 v4 processors
- 128GB RAM
- 8 x 300GB 15K SAS hard drives
I took the box downstairs to where the server is going to live. I took pictures as I unboxed it as I like to do. The condition looks fantastic! I placed the server on the rack where it will live. I then went through and documented each part and their serial number and location. This helped me verify everything arrived as ordered and makes it easier to reference later on.
I installed the power supplies to the back of the chassis. Now to find a monitor to connect to it. VGA…..do I even have any VGA cables left at this point? I ended up getting rid of all my older stuff a few years ago after the basement flooded. Victory I found one VGA cable. All that dead technology? Keep one copy of it because you’ll never know when you’ll need to go back to it in the future.
Brought over the monitor, keyboard, and mouse and hooked them up. Connected power to the power supplies and the server has booted to setup. Nice! I went into the iDRAC configuration and manually set the network address I want. Then I connected an ethernet cable from the iDRAC controller to the network. Let’s test connectivity from my desktop. Success! Upon log in I changed the password for root and documented it in my password manager.
The server is running around 64 decibels which is right around what I was expecting so it won’t be too loud for anyone in the house. While logged in to the iDRAC I look through the system’s status now that it has been running for a while. Power and voltage all looks fine and temperatures are looking good at this point. I quickly set up some NTP servers for time.
It is about time for me to move on to something else for today but I will say it looks like they did update the firmware for me before they shipped the server. That is just super nice and convenient. My hat is off to savemyserver.com they did an excellent job and made the entire process very easy.
