Quiet Lab Servers

Hello all,

Earlier this year I purchased a Dell PowerEdge 2950 to use a an ESXi server for labbing purposes. It is a good server, but it is damn loud (those fans)! Do you have any advice for quieter options for servers of this level? I'm looking to eventually get a second server, and I want it to be considerably quieter...

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Comments

MentholMoose

inscom.brigade wrote: »

I want coooler with less noise.

(hate that 120mm mutiple fan 24/7/365).

It is definitely possible to have a quiet lab as long as you do a little research. I built my latest lab server with three things in mind: low power utilization, low noise, and high VM density. It has a Supermicro H8SCM-F motherboard, a hex-core AMD Opteron 4162 EE CPU, four SSDs, 32 GB RAM, and an 80 Plus Gold PSU. It uses under 50 watts with 20-30 VMs running on ESXi. It's in a Chenbro workstation case with three low-RPM 120mm fans (typically spinning around 700 RPM) which are virtually silent, and a 92mm FAN on the CPU heatsink which hovers around 1000 RPM and is similarly quiet.

networkjutsu

Mine is really quiet. I can barely hear it. My HTPC is louder than this guy.

Lian Li PC-V351B
Supermico MBD-X9SCL+-F
Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge
Antec EA-380D Green
2 x Kingston 8GB DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered
SanDisk Cruzer Blade 4GB USB Flash Drive

LinuxRacr

Got my new build up and running today. Now I just have to transfer all of my old data over to my new 3TB disk, so that I can install ESXi on my thumb drive, and use my old storage disk for a datastore. Here are my specs:

Corsair Carbide Series 300R Case
Corsair AX750 Professional Gold Series PSU
Asus Crosshair V Formula-Z Motherboard
AMD FX-8350 8-Core Processor (Vishera)
G.Skill Trident X DDR3-1866 Memory (8GBx2)
Corsair H80i Hydro Series CPU Cooler (with Cougar Vortex PWM 120mm fans)
NVidia Geforce GTX 650 2GB GDDR5
Samsung 840 Pro Series 256GB SSD (Windows boot brive)
SanDisk Cruzer Fit™ 8GB USB Flash Drive (ESXi boot drive)
Seagate Barracuda 3TB hardrive 7200 RPM,64MB Cache (storage space)