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The Dell PowerEdge M910 is a powerful blade sever (up to 32 Xeon CPU cores) and I found it at a very low price. However, I'd like to make sure there is a way to run it at home (without all the infrastructure of a datacenter) before buying it. What is the very minimalistic setup I need to run a Dell PowerEdge M910 Blade server at home?

Psddp
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    i think you just need to ensure having enough power, and maybe some kind of ear plugs to reduce the noise.. with just 1 server it shouldn't be very hot but it's better if you have a cave or something colder than your appartment – olivierg Aug 01 '17 at 20:05
  • If you want to run a Dell server at home, stick with the R series servers. R stands for Rack, but they are fully enclosed and everything they need is included. M stands for Modular, and as such you need each of the modules mentioned in music2myear's answer to make it work. – Joe Aug 01 '17 at 22:17
  • I didn't know that's what the letters stood for. Good info @Joe. – music2myear Aug 01 '17 at 23:40
  • It would be better to run it from a UPS (capable to produce the required power). But nothing avoids this. – peterh Aug 02 '17 at 01:10

1 Answers1

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Well, a blade server isn't much by itself. It needs a chassis.

The M910 blade is compatible with the M1000E chassis, so you'll need one of those.

The M1000E chassis should run on normal 110 US electrical current as it only draws 14 Amps per power supply. You'll probably want to run a separate circuit for each though, as many household breakers are 20A max.

Because the M910 blade can contain both compute and storage, so long as you have both in the blade you got, you won't need anything else

So, you'll need the M1000E chassis, and a nice set of isolated power sockets, and probably some earplugs.

But, some straight-talk here, you were probably sold a bill of goods.

A blade server is a small part of a larger whole, and it not what you usually find in the normal home lab because it requires the much larger, much more expensive chassis.

You only need a single server, not a blade or chassis, for a basic home lab setup, and I'm guessing this is your first piece of kit for your home lab. So this is way overkill, and you're going to have to spend a lot of money to get it running.

music2myear
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