A few years ago I had a couple old and slow Optiplex's running Hyper-V, with Windows/Linux VM's, doing things like NPS, AD, etc.
Had some old equipment collecting dust, so I've built out a decent homelab and am curious if anyone else has done the same, and if so what are they running on them for fun?
In my new "rack":
- PowerEdge R430
- Running ProxMox, with a Windows VM (DC), and a Linux VM with Docker for Plex
- EqualLogic PS4100
- VM storage for both PowerEdge servers (10TB)
- Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch 24 250w
- PowerEdge R720
- Running ProxMox, with some Linux VM's, most utilizing Docker for Plex "assistance/automations" (ahem), NextCloud for phone photo backup and wife's photography, and another DC as a failover of R430's DC.
Gave up running old server hardware. Way too loud and way too much power draw.
Now running a Synology DS918+ for most things and an old Dell Optiplex 3020 for blue iris. It no longer sounds like somebody is vacuuming in the basement all of the time and my power draw went from over 200W down to about 40W.
Similar situation. I realized my desktop that I constantly upgrade every few years was always going to be faster and more powerful than older or salvaged hardware. I now just keep it on all the time and run VMs on it as needed. Just one physical machine to maintain now! I run Aster on it so it acts as three physical machines. It is my gaming machine, my parteners gaming machine, file server, development server, database server, emulator pedestal, Emby server, Blue Iris server, and my work computer.
Yeah, my main thought was this is free(minus power costs of course), which is why I went with it.
I looked into different Synology solutions with some kind of host such as your setup, how are you liking Synology as a NAS and does the Optiplex as a host give you any draw backs(NIC/CPU/Memory maxing out, etc)?
Synology is good. I upgraded the RAM in it to 8GB and populated it with 3x8TB Ironwolf drives. It's the backup target for all other machines on my network as well as running just under 40 docker containers. It's just not beefy enough to run VM's tho. The Optiplex machine just runs blue iris since it's a windows app. This one I added a 500GB SSD and left it at stock 4GB RAM. It works well with blueiris so long as you turn on intel native encoding and don't try to reencode anything onto the stream like date/time stamps. Don't have any issues with resources on it.
Free is good, and admittedly you have much more headroom to do fun things on your hardware :)
Same. It was a shame to let a working server go to waste, but the fan droning was making me crazy.