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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

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago* (last edited 7 hours ago) (2 children)

I would look into setting up a proxmox cluster ~~with high availability~~ on them and from there you can look into fun projects that you can run as proxmox vms or lxcs.
https://www.xda-developers.com/proxmox-cluster-guide/
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/High_Availability

edit: HA seems to require a shared disk, such as a SAN or NAS.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

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).

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago

Ah right, that rings a bell. Proxmox and Ceph sounds like a perfect experiment for OPs hardware. :)
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-pveceph.html

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago (2 children)

Eh... Maybe for learning.

Although they technically support vt-d, performance on 13-year-old machines will be pretty abysmal by today's standards.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 hours ago

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.