I have a self-built system for pretty-much this built around a Supermicro board X11SCH-LN4F with Xeon E-2146G. I have 8 drives (not hot-swap) in a ZFS array, plus nvme for the OS, and I use Noctuas all round. Not silent but quiet enough. Idles around 80w and I run a number of containers/VMs on it as well as storage. I went with a low end 4U case with shallow 45cm depth.

The motherboard takes up to 128GB ECC UDIMMS and has 4 ethernet ports (plus a 5th for IPMI) and a good number of SATA ports (I am running 8 drives without additional cards).

I have enterprise rackmount gear as well and my DIY box is in a different league silence-wise (and efficient low-idle CPU wise as well).

If building today, the equivalent current CPU is, I think, E-2246G.

What power strip? Kenable sell individually switched ones for around £35, pulse is the brand. I just bought 3 of them.

Not in a position to try this right now, but if your server is a Dell and you have the (enterprise, possibly) iDRAC, I think you can make a light on the drive caddy blink so you can identify it.

The important digit is the middle one which is the generation and x10 is oldest. Current gen is x60. The x is type with 1 being mist basic 1 CPU box and it goes up from there. Odd numbers tend to be 2u and even 1u but there are exceptions to that. The 0 on the end means Intel, a 5 would be amd.

Just wanted to add that I got a T400 and it fits lovely in my R640 low-profile slot and no complaints. Works great, passed through to VM.

I have a MD3200 coupled to a R510 that I plan to do exactly this with. i have 12 4TB drives in the MD3200 and 12 2TB drives in the R510. Monthly zfs pull is my aim. Once I work out how to use the MD3200 that is!

I’m just planning a rack build. I have rack uprights from a 42u rack I plan to cut down to size and then I plan to use ready rails to load servers. I’m thinking 15u for this, possibly two side by side (30u total, below desk height). I am thinking of using dowels and glue as it’s supposed to be strongest. Not sure yet…

I have some dimensions worked out based on having real metal uprights inside the wooden frame. Can post some notes tomorrow if it would help, I don’t have to hand right now.

It isn’t clear what you’re trying to as you’re talking about iDRAC and VNC. So you have a Docker container running what? Linux? And you’re trying to access what? I am going to presume you want to access the Enterprise iDRAC’s virtual console screen.

Now, you mention iDRAC6. This is for a gen11 server, is that correct… so a Rx10 PowerEdge server like a R710 or something? The console on iDRAC6 is a Java based console, not VNC. You have to have Java installed on the machine you’re running your browser. And it needs to be java-8-jre if I remember right. Newer iDRACs don’t have this issue.

I don’t think you need to be using Docker unless you can’t install the JRE on your host. And then, I am not sure how you’d be using it from inside a container as you’d need to be running your browser from there. Sorry if I misunderstand.

I can tell you with absolute certainty (because we do it in production environments), the iDRAC6 console needs a specific old version of Java.

Fill in more details, I’m happy to help you if I can. It’s a bugger to get it working, but it is possible.

I asked a similar thing the other day but about a 640. The problem I have is a power error during boot that requires F1 to continue but otherwise works fine. The docs mention supporting up to 3 nvidia T4 series cards. Is that Tesla and would that include T400 which looks like it would fit. I just want to avoid the boot error if I can.