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Setting Up Dell R720 Server in the Home Lab

·4 mins
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Dell R720 Server
About two years ago I came across a Dell PowerEdge R720 at a price that was hard to ignore — 192GB ECC RAM and dual Xeon E5-2697v2 for what a single mid-range workstation costs new. The idea was to have a proper machine for heavier workloads and experiments in the homelab, and it’s been doing exactly that since. Getting it running wasn’t complicated, but there were a few things worth documenting — fan noise control via iDRAC, firmware updates, migrating Proxmox over NFS, and wiring up the UPS.

Specs
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  • Form factor: 2U rack
  • RAM: 192GB ECC DDR3
  • CPUs: Dual Intel Xeon E5-2697v2
  • iDRAC: iDRAC7 Enterprise
  • Storage: 2× 2TB SSD (RAID 1) + 6× 300GB SAS 6Gb/s (RAID 10)
  • Network: Dual-port integrated Gigabit Ethernet
  • PSU: Dual redundant (750W each)

What it draws with this config:

120–150 W

idle

192GB RAM, both CPUs, SSDs

200–250 W

under load

sustained

~300 W

peak

heavy workloads

It arrived broken
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The front backplane was disconnected, because the mini SAS cable that came with it was too short to reach. A 59cm cable fixed it. Worth checking before you conclude the backplane is dead — no drives are detected either way, and the two look identical from the OS.

Fan control over IPMI
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The R720 is loud out of the box, and the default curve doesn’t care that the room it’s in is not a datacentre. IPMItool takes the fans off automatic over the network, through iDRAC.

sudo apt-get install ipmitool

# Take manual control
ipmitool -I lanplus -H ip_addr -U username -P password raw 0x30 0x30 0x01 0x00

# Hand it back to the firmware
ipmitool -I lanplus -H ip_addr -U username -P password raw 0x30 0x30 0x01 0x01

# Set a fixed speed — last byte is the percentage, in hex
ipmitool -I lanplus -H ip_addr -U username -P password raw 0x30 0x30 0x02 0xff 0x14
Caution

Manual mode means exactly that — the firmware stops raising the fans when things get hot. Set a floor you’re comfortable leaving unattended, and hand control back before anything that loads the machine hard. Mine sits at 0x14.

What the last byte buys you:

PercentHexRPM
10%0x0A~3,300 RPM
16%0x10~3,900 RPM
20%0x14~4,000 RPM
25%0x19~4,700 RPM
30%0x1E~5,400 RPM
40%0x28~7,300 RPM
50%0x32~8,000 RPM
60%0x3C~9,400 RPM
70%0x46~10,800 RPM
80%0x50~12,100 RPM
90%0x5A~13,300 RPM
100%0x6415,000 RPM

And to see what they’re actually doing:

ipmitool sensor | grep -i fan

Firmware, without a support contract
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Dell retired the FTP repository iDRAC used to update from. Kenneth Finnegan runs a community mirror of it, and iDRAC can still pull from that — you only have to tell it which generation you are. Wikipedia’s PowerEdge list has the mapping: the R720 is gen 12, so g12.

  1. 1

    Open the updater

    In the iDRAC web interface, Maintenance → System Update.
  2. 2

    Point it at the mirror

    Select FTP: address ftp.updateyodell.net, user dell, password calvin, path g12.
  3. 3

    Apply

    Check for Updates, then apply what it finds.

Moving Proxmox onto it
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An NFS share on the Synology DS223 was the whole migration path. Add it to the new host as backup storage, and the vzdump archives already on it become restorable:

pvesm add nfs synology --server <synology_ip> --export /volume1/proxmox --content backup
pct restore <vmid> /mnt/pve/synology/dump/vzdump-lxc-<vmid>-<timestamp>.tar.zst --storage local-lvm
qmrestore /mnt/pve/synology/dump/vzdump-qemu-<vmid>-<timestamp>.vma.zst <vmid> --storage local-lvm

Storage
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Two 2TB SSDs in RAID 1 for the OS and primary applications. Six 300GB SAS drives in RAID 10 for data — gives you the read performance of striping with redundancy against single drive failures. Configured through the PERC controller during initial setup.

UPS, on PowerPanel
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CyberPower UPS, and I went with PowerPanel rather than NUT — vendor tool, vendor hardware, one less integration to debug.

curl -fL -o powerpanel.deb 'https://www.cyberpower.com/tw/en/File/GetFileSampleByType?fileId=SU-18070001-06&fileType=Download%20Center&fileSubType=FileOriginal'
dpkg -i powerpanel.deb

The quotes matter: unquoted, the shell cuts the URL at the first & and runs the rest as background jobs.

The policy is one line, and the two thresholds are an OR:

pwrstat -lowbatt -runtime 300 -capacity 35 -active on -cmd /etc/pwrstatd-lowbatt.sh -duration 1 -shutdown on

This triggers a graceful shutdown when runtime drops below 300 seconds or battery capacity falls under 35%, with a 1-minute delay before executing. The script at /etc/pwrstatd-lowbatt.sh handles any pre-shutdown tasks you want to run.

References
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