I’m not tech illiterate, but it’s also not my job or anything. That said I managed to figure out how to get a synology up and running and it hosts my Jellyfin and *arrs. Nothing too exciting. I also have a couple of vps’s that I use for nextcloud, a recipe server, all in docker containers. Not nothing but also, not the hardest thing to accomplish.
Well, my manager gifted me an old Dell PowerEdge R720 and 4 hard drives. Yeah, this is way more than I know what to do with, or even where to start. Do I need to plug both power cables in? I still need to figure out how to get a monitor hooked up to it with what looks to be a VGA cable. And even then this thing is a behemoth and what do I even do with it?? My manager was so excited to talk to me about it and I’m all 😵💫
Where do I start?
typically you only need one power supply to run it, once you move to redundant power you can use the second one in case the first one fails. when you plug both in it will just balance across both until one fails.
in my opinion, hardware should only be hypervisors that run virtual machines, then you can provision VMs, similar to using VPSs. going this route you will need a vga monitor for initial setup, eventually everything is done over the lan with a web ui or ssh.
i use proxmox which is Debian based for the hypervisor.
As far as what you do with it, is that you can in theory replace the VPSs or test software in your lan.
to compare, i have my router (vyos), homeassistant, a docker server for hosting small services, a network lab (gns3), windows and mac VMs, and more running on a cluster that is using similar hardware.