I got a stack of PCS that are very similar if not identical. Third gen i7, 8 gigs of ram, one terabyte hdd, all but one are the same HP model with the same motherboard, etc too. I upgraded the RAM in a few of them, and I have enough spare TB hard drives to put an extra in each. Two have Nvidia GeForce 210 gpus, and the unique one out of the bunch I'll probably throw in a spare RX 570 I have.
But, what to do with them? Easiest answer is probably sell them all for $75 each but that's not what we do here, right? Right now I'm assuming they all support w o l and I can easily set up ansible/awx for orchestration. I'm just looking for some fun experiments, projects, or actual uses for this Tower of PC towers
You should be able to do HA with ceph, I think. You can do almost-HA with zfs mirrors, where instead of instant failover you only lose data up to the last mirror sync (a few minutes max).
Ceph is great, we run critical infra at work on proxmox with ceph. Very reliable in my experience. It was definitely helpful for me to have ceph experience from my home cluster when starting there.
They are not too terrible really. 3rd gen i7 is the Ivy Bridge generation, so 22 nm. For many homelab server tasks the CPUs would be just fine. Power efficiency is of course worse than modern CPUs, but way better than the previous 32 nm Sandybridge generation. I had such a system with integrated graphics and one SSD and that drew 15 W at idle at the wall.
Yeah, I focused on the I’m just looking for some fun experiments, projects part.
I wouldn't use the machines for anything other than experimenting for fun, they're power hungry too if counting per performance.
The at load efficency isn't always the most important metric, depending on what you are using the machines for. If they are mostly idle, efficiency isn't too bad. Many server tasks don't load the CPU to the fullest anyway.
That's true, if there's no load then the difference isn't much money.
I'm running a NAS, some game servers, a forgejo instance and a jellyfin server and more on my machine so it's never truly idle and I forgot to think about that metric.
Slap a few zigbee smart plugs into your setup, cluster them in Home Assistant, and measure the total power draw. That's what I do. It's eye-opening... I learned that my 5800X3D/7900XTX gaming PC is capable of pulling exponentially more power than my entire server cluster. I shut that thing off when I'm not using it now haha.
Damn, that's impressive. My rig idles at ~110W, but I've heard that the 5800X3D just....does that. Especially so with the fact that it has AMD's beefiest GPU.