Dell R640 longevity for XCP-NG

Computer Hardware & Server Infrastructure Builds
1

I have an old VMware Essentials cluster running on 3xSupermicro SYS-1028R-WMRT servers with 2xE5-2630v3 CPUs and 256GB RAM in each. We have 30-40 VMs that perform various functions, nothing too crazy compute or IOPS wise. They’re attached to a Synology FS2017 all-flash array via 10GbE iSCSI (multipathed using two separate air-gapped 10GbE switches for redundancy. Yes, way overkill). Nodes are also dual-10GbE linked to our network on a LAG with multiple VLANs trunked.

That system has served us very well for several years but it’s time to migrate away from it over to XCP-NG on “new” hardware. New hardware mostly just because it isn’t practical to do it in place on my existing setup, which is still in fantastic shape.

My idea is to purchase 3x “new” servers: 2 XCP-NG nodes, the third used as a dedicated TrueNAS NFS appliance temporarily.

I’d migrate the VMs from VMware to the two XCP-NG nodes (the third TrueNAS NFS machine being the SR). Once that’s humming I’d reformat the Synology and deploy as NFS, moving the SR there after. Then I’d recommission the third server as a third XCP-NG node.

I do not have a huge budget for this and I’m looking at used / refurb servers. It seems like the Dell Poweredge R640 systems are the best bang for the buck out there at the moment. They’re solidly built, plentiful and affordable for spares, have great management features etc. They are several years old of course, but is there any pressing reason why I shouldn’t consider them for the migration? I don’t think the older PCIe gen 3 is an issue, we’re not doing anything higher than 10GbE on any interface. I know they’re physically longer than my Supermicros but that’s not an issue for our rack.

I guess I’m asking how many more years I can expect XCP-NG to support this hardware / modern operating systems as guests? When was the last time XCP-NG killed support for a major swath of servers (if ever) and how old was that generation?

2

I guess it depends on the config that you need, but I’d look at new Supermicro and see if you can build something similar. What is your current vmware core count, and do you need as many as you might have (or need more)?

I would do your change differently. I’d set all 3 new servers up as XCP-ng, if you need a temporary storage server, I’d use one of the old servers for this. Migrate the VMs off of one old server, convert to temp. storage, and go. Alternate is install storage into the new XCP-ng servers, migrate to local storage, then wipe the Synology and migrate them to shared storage. You could keep it iSCSI, XCP-ng supports this.

As far as age goes, there may be a point in XCP-ng where you need to have UEFI, until then, you can get by on some pretty old stuff. Xeon v2 is working fine for me right now, but X56xx was giving me some issues with Windows Server so I passed those older machines on. Xeon v4 or Scalable v2 and forward should be good for a while. If you look at used Supermicro, I would suggest X11 or newer if possible, though there are sometimes deals on X10 stuff (big twin quad has dropped a lot recently on the used market).

3

XCP-ng does not really kill off old systems like VMWare so there should be plenty of life left in the r640.