I found a Dell R620 on Facebook Marketplace for 2000 DH and honestly the timing was pretty good.
I was already working on a project with my dad, basically an ERP for managing farms, plus a few other things around it. I’ll probably talk about that project in another post because that’s its own thing.
Before the R620 I already had a couple mini-PCs that I was using as servers each one of them and its job . The main one i was using for this was an old 6th gen i3 with 8GB of RAM running Ubuntu with the desktop UI, Docker, and already a bunch of services on top of that.
Then I found the R620.
Mine came with two Xeon E5-2630 v2 CPUs, 48GB of ECC RAM, a PERC H710 RAID controller, iDRAC Enterprise, a 256GB SSD and a 1TB HDD.
Obviously it’s old hardware, but 48GB of RAM compared to the 8GB mini PC was a pretty big upgrade for what I wanted to do, and for 2000 DH I couldn’t really complain except the sound and power usage :).
First thing I did was put Proxmox on it.
That part was actually pretty easy because I had already installed Proxmox on mini PCs before. The only new stuff for me was messing with iDRAC and figuring out the virtual disks through the RAID controller ,and that was pretty much it.
Right now, the R620 is mainly hosting some ERP projects I’m working on with my dad. and I spin up other VMs to try services or developing (vibe coding) stuff that i want to try as a matter of fact this page that you are reading this from was hosted on a VM on that server that i used as a transitional server for modifying the opensource portfolio and adding notes.
I’ll probably come back to the R620 in another post once I’ve messed with it more. There’s already a bunch of stuff around iDRAC, fan control, storage and other random things that could probably be their own posts.
For now though, it does what I bought it for.
And knowing how these things usually go, this is probably just the start of another rabbit hole.