hey it works I’m really excited today to do an unboxing of a server that I just recently got this is a HP dl360p gen8 server it’s got 3.5 inch form factor drives to dual 460 watt power supplies it’s got 2 8 core Xeon processors which I believe are like that Xeon 2043 or something like that they’re low clock the clock kind of love 1.7 gigahertz but there’s a 8 core 16 threads massive amount of cache and yes so I’m super excited I got it from a place called Aventis systems on Xfurbish and it was about 400 bucks for the server I’ve always really wanted my own enterprise-grade server but I’ve always had to kind of make do with repurposing towers and you know using virtual machine floating Active
Directory on to a virtual machine and whatnot so now I’ve actually got my own dedicated hardware I’m super excited to cut it open and take a look what’s inside so let’s get to it all right so seeing like the camera is a little bit zoomed out that’s because it is because this box is huge this is a standard sized rack-mountable 1u server so yeah box is pretty big so I’m going to cut it open and I just ends up this is a refurbished server there’s no way you’re going to get this past server for 400 bucks and lessons refurbished so yeah the hundred open here and I apologize in advance if any of this stuff is out of frame or whatnot usually when I do reviews
unboxings I’m working with the smaller smaller equipment this is so it’s not a pretty big all right opening it up let’s see what event it’s packed it in plastic and it’s like that spray foam insulation I’m glad they put this in home because I’ve actually already dropped this one so alright looks like two power cables and paper alright lift this thing out so this thing is not white I would say this is probably have 35 plus pounds this thing is pretty heavy this out real quick alright so now we’re going to take a look at the front of the server to start out by pulling these little faux drive cages out these are not real drive caddies but pull these out I will need to get some Drive caddies for the 3.5 inch drives or the server alright so you go to drive bays 1 2 3 & 4 you get your uid button this is really cool you press this button it lights up blue and then on the back of the server there is a corresponding light that will light up blue as well and what it does is if you’re working in a server rack environment and you have a bunch of these 1u or to use servers stacked on top of each other you can say I’m working on this one not on this one not on this one it’s a credibly useful to have so got this little information pull out here it’s got the serial number and the product ID helpful
if you’re trying to you know get support on a device or if you just you know what quick access to the serial number so on the sides you’ve got these two little switches and these basically allow the server to be put into a rack mount and then locked in place and then in order to slide it out you pull these down and then it slides out you useful have so you’ve got act power activity lights and then you’ve got network activity lights here on the side you’ve got USB 2.0 USB 2.0 and that is some type of an input I don’t know if that’s an eSATA input or not and yeah that’s about all
The front of the drive sorry for the front of the server so let’s flip it around and we’ll take a look at the back seat is super super long you’ve ever worked with real enterprise-grade servers they are quite long 27 to 30 inches long so kind of a little bit unwieldy to deal with sometimes alright so going along the back first thing you’ll notice is you’ve got four network ports and these are all gigabit network ports you’ve got a serial port a VGA port two more USB 2.0 s and an I low which I believe is for intelligent life out it’s a management port for the server incredibly useful to have especially if things are going horribly wrong with the operating system that’s loaded onto the server
you can get in through the ILA port and you can manage some basic functions of the server at a more of a firmware level so useful have two more USB 2.0 ports over there get redundant 750 watt power supplies there hot-swappable this is one of those features that really sets aside sets enterprise-grade equipment apart from a you know enthusiast great equipment or just you know general home use equipment so in a regular computer.
obviously you’re not going to have redundant power supplies and they’re definitely not going to be hot trappable so this is this is cool helps to provide always-on functionality if this were running in a production environment and one of these burns out you can just pull it out it’ll be running on this power supply you plug it back in and you plug a new one in you’re good to go you never have to take the server down so in a always on you know production environment this is a really critical piece right here and that’s one of the things that I really wanted in in my server so all right flip it back around and now what we’re going to do is we are going to open up the hood and we’re going to take a look at the components on the inside so let me readjust the camera real quick okay so now we’ve taken a look at the outside of the server let’s pop off the hood and let’s see what it looks like inside so
One of the first things that you’re going to notice is it’s got this little latch right here push in this gray tab pull it back and it pops off and it’s also a little screw in the latch that you can set to lock or unlock so all right so just taking a look you’ve got 8 fans in here these are redundant and hot swappable so if one of these fans were to burn out while the server was running you could remove the fan all you do to remove the fan is pull up and out it is really simple I had to do this on servers at work and then these will keep running the servers still up you get the new one put it in you clamp it down you’re good to go now obviously these other fans are going to spin up to compensate so these are going to run super loud if one of these missing and also when the server boots up it’s going to run incredibly loud it’s going to sound a little bit like a windstorm is going on so but otherwise they should run not too loud at idle or just during regular usage.
if they are running extremely loud it probably means you have a heating issue or or a cooling issue with your server and it’s these fans are compensating so you want to be careful that listen to your servers if they sound overly loud you might have an issue so let me move down a little bit so you’ll notice that there’s a couple of plugs here so this one is a data connector and it is going to the backplane which all the hard drives plug into 3.5 inch hard drives over here you’ve got power so this is powering the I believe it’s a SATA or sac backplane and this is the data this yeah so you can just plug all the hard drives in they all go into this backplane and then this takes data back to the motherboard and then this supplies power for it so let’s move the camera up a little bit alright so one of the things going to jump out at you here is you got these two giant metal things these are the heat sinks for the CPUs this is a dual socket motherboard that means there’s one Xeon cup under here and there’s one Xeon cup under here you’ve also got your DIMM slots for memory this board supports error-correcting memory as any good server will and it I believe you can put 196 or more gigs of RAM depends on the type of RAM I believe with error-correcting memory there is some limitations on the amount so I’m Live these are eight gigs of ddr3 error-correcting memory so
it looks like it comes with about 32 gigs by default I’m probably going to increase that as much as I can afford so you’ve got a PCIe 16 plot here so you can put peripherals in but obviously the peripherals are either going to have to be incredibly low profile because this thing is only you know an ancient a half tall or you’re going to have to get a some type of a riser board which will allow the peripheral 2 to run to stick out sideways so yeah that is most of what’s going on in the interior there is I don’t know if you can see this but there is an SD card slot up here and what that allows
you to do is you can load something such as vSphere onto an SD card and then you can plug it into you can you can put the SD card into the motherboard and then you can run a a bare-metal hypervisor for virtualization it’s a really cool feature so yeah that is about it for the interior so what I want to do now is plug the server in fire it up and see what happens now what I’m guessing is is that it’s going to boot up it’s going to get power it’s going to check memories going to check the the CPU and then it’s going to hang this let’s say wait a second there’s no operating system so I but either way I want to plug it in and let’s we’ll see what happens so if you mean just second and I’ll get this thing’s like it plugging into the back of these out redundant power supplies and as I said I’m not 100% sure what’s going to happen but I think it’s just going to uh it’s going to fail to boot but
the power-on self-test actually you know actually should work even without hard drives so I’m plugging it in now and I can hear something alright so the fans inside the power supplies are actually kicking on I can hear them really really angry worrying around now I’m going to go to the front and looks like the power LED on the front is amber I’m going to press that see if I need it to boot up so that sound is what I was talking about the fans spinning up they shouldn’t stay like that but if they do stay like that you have a serious problem and you’re really not going to want to be in that server room so the fans are spinning up right now it it does take a while for a server to boot up so let’s give it a few seconds I don’t know if it’s going to give me any kind of a beep code because on a typical consumer-grade motherboard if you if it’s if it passes post the power-on self-test it should not give you any beep codes because deep codes usually mean that you’re missing an input device or the CPU is an issue or the RAM or the power supplier or something like that you typically would just get to a boot screen and it would say you know booting no boot device sound so in this case there’s no hard drives in here so I’m expecting it to go to boot and then nothing’s happened but uh yeah so it looks like it’s turned on just checking these fans all these fans are powered up so I want to show you I’m going to just yank one of these fans out and everything keeps going now because it’s not under load the other fans are freaking out that noise the fan telling me that their fan has been removed so I’m going to plug it back in but then I plugged it back in and it was all good to go so redundant power supplies check this out then yank one in power slide everything keeps going it’s it’s running both power slides at the same time doesn’t even need to cut over it just is able to work with only one Super Bowl plug it back in everything stays the same so yeah that is a sabalan for for this you know unboxing and review I am really excited about this server like I said about 400 bucks I got it from Aventis systems on Xfurbish and it is a
HP gen8 dl360p with the 3.5 inch form factor drive bays dual 750 watts redundant power supplies and dual eight cores beyond processors so super good deal I’m really happy with it so far I’m going to play around with it a little bit more and yeah probably doing a series of server build videos in the future.
I just wanted to say thank you again for Reading my unboxing and review of the server isn’t the very first time I’ve been able to really own enterprise-grade server hardware and I’m really excited to be able to use it in my lab I’m probably going to put VMware hypervisor clients on the server and mess around with creating some VM Adams Ram to it and just kind of general poking around I do have access to this kind of hardware at work but if you crash a hopper server or break a server at work you know you get fired so it’s a really nice be able to have this in my own lab environment so that I can experiment and obviously as I experiment and you know work with hardware I’ll try to document some of that and I can you know upload this Article maybe somebody will be able to benefit from some of the information if you have any comments questions or concerns please feel free to drop a comment in the comment section and as always thank you for Reading the article and yeah that was a good one thank you.
Refurbished Reviews 