Virtual Machines In Servers - POWEREDGE 2900

[Alex Abarca]

I just got one of these:

http://www.dell.com/downloads/emea/products/pedge/en/pe2900_Spec_Sheet_Quad.pdf

And I am trying to figure out what to do with it. I dont have any experience with servers or making Virtual machines. The server is DELL POWEREDGE 2900 with a Xeon 5120 Woodcrest 1.82Ghz, dual socket with Virtualization Technology.

Is capable of working as Virtual machines to make a RENDERFARM?

[Ludvik Koutny]

Why do you buy so expensive hardware when you do not know what to do with it? :O

[Juraj]

It's not expensive, it's 4 years old very low-end basic server, not performance oriented. Probably from friend, or eBay ?

It doesn't need virtualization to run on it, it's regular dual-socket unit, with 2x DUAL-CORE Xeons clocked at 1.8GHz. {it was 140 euros per CPU...4 years ago}

The performance ? Multithreaded: 8 times less then single i7. Useless for anything today.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+5120+%40+1.86GHz

It belongs directly into trash :- )

[Alex Abarca]

Juraj hit the specs right on the money.

I visited my friend's engineering studio and he told me he was using a CLOUD for his network, and the first thing that dawn on me was...GIVE ME YOUR SERVER!
So he gave it to me for free.

Reason I asked about the virtual machines was... where I used to work the IT guy made a renderfarm from old dell blades that were considered trash, but he made them virtual machines and they were able to render Ok. I think one of the servers was a poweredge 2500 series. Looks too nice to be in the trash...

Alex

[Juraj]

Well, if he gave you like 8 of these, you would be able to render with speed of single i7 4770 node costing 600 euros, but you would have 6 big, loud machines to feed.

Virtualization is quite complicated topic, I know very little about it, but the point of it is it won't let you harness performance that simply isn't there.
If it's too nice to trash, you can keep it as souvenir ;- ) It can still web-server, and other small tasks.

[Alex Abarca]

Thanks for the insight, Worst comes to worst I can reverse engineer it and screw on parts ro make a renderfarm. That's my next thing to do, building up my studio and now I need computer power.

[maru]

Or you can sell it and buy something better... or at least a part of something better. :)

[Alex Abarca]

Thats a good idea.

[Juraj]

Thanks for the insight, Worst comes to worst I can reverse engineer it and screw on parts ro make a renderfarm. That's my next thing to do, building up my studio and now I need computer power.

You have very good visuals on your portfolio ! You should have no problem being able to afford proper computers, the thing about the fad with getting old/refurbished/etc.. servers cheaply is that
their architecture is mostly outdated in performance by the time you can get them cheaply. It's very rarely a good deal for us. They're completely fine for many tasks, but rendering isn't one of them.

Don't waste any money and effort, there is nothing you can upgrade about it to make it "render-farm". It's not render-farm material just because it's build on mythical "server" platform. It's just old piece of metal,
like any other computer.