New Servers | Need Help

[Paul O Carroll]

Recently a friend gave me 2 old dell poweredge 2850's. So, they both have dual xeons, not too sure what model. 8 gb ram. And about 1500 gb between them. Because I am new to servers and have honeslty never seen one in real life before, I was wondering if anyone have any advice. For example I was thinking of setting them up as nas's. So if I was at work I could still access them remotely ( I have no clue how to do that ). But I also saw some people setting them up as rendering rigs. So I import edited videos and they render them and my pc won't drop frames. (Again no idea how to that)..... If anyone has anyone other cool things to do with them, please any advice is helpful.

I was thinking of just putting all the hard drives into one system and using the old as redundant or just sell it. Now I also have a few problem. There is only one room that I could put it in, that would be my office. My questions are do they run hot, loud etc. Oh and what about the electricity costs I know they have two 700w on them.

I haven't actually booted them up yet, but I know for a fact they work. So what happens if they have no OS. Will I just stick one on with a USB ? What OS... Linux, Windows Server ?

And lastly if I was to set it up as a NAS or anything else. Are there any great programs just to always run. I have no clue about servers. Any good programs at all to help would be great. I might have a few more questions. But anyway thank to anyone who got this far. Any advice is greatly appreciated. Cheers 🙂

 

[noidea_77]

Try to well them for some $! Just power them up and you will know why. Server are very, very loud and these are very old ones, that use a lot of power, especially when running 7*24. Beside all that, a windows server license is expensive, so only a supported linux (you need the drivers for the server chipset!) might do it. To make a long story short: it might be fun to play around with them, but without practical us.
Enter the service tag and get the details for your machines: http://www.dell.com/support/home/us/en/19/product-support/product/poweredge-2850/configuration