These days used and refurbished enterprise grade hardware can be found easily and at very low prices, making it almost irresistible for a home lab. Some of it, is even certified after being tested by the manufacturers themselves.
I found in an online marketplace, a refurbished 7th generation HP Proliant DL360 server, with dual Intel Xeon X5650 processors, 8GB DDR3-1333 of memory, HP Smart Array P410i raid controller, four disk bays, two 300GB 10 000 RPM HDDs and two PSUs. The price was really good, so I decided to buy it with the intent of building a new home lab. The server didn’t arrive in the original box but it didn’t cause any damages.
Upon arrival of a used server I recommend visually inspecting the server to find any damages or faults that were not mentioned or shown in the ad, and confirming that all parts were sent as advertised.
Pay special attention to the RAM modules, because servers are very picky about them, and if you requested the seller to mount a matched set now is a good moment to verify it. Try find out if the case has any serial number, record it to later confirm that it matches the one in the BIOS.
The next step I recommend, is to find the server’s manual in the manufacturer’s website and use it as guide to turn it on connected to a monitor and keyboard, to confirm that it does not have administrator passwords or boot passwords, if it does contact the seller. After confirming that unknown credentials aren’t present, try to reset it to the factory settings in the BIOS, and deleting any pre-existing RAID settings in the RAID controller.
I also recommend running a few passes of a memory test, to verify that it doesn’t trigger errors, and ensure that the server is stable to some degree, for example monitor the CPU frequency, BUS, cache and temperature under a light load. It will take a lot of time, in the order of several hours. If possible try to inspect all the fans individually and test the power supply failover.
I will discuss in later posts further diagnostics, how to cleanup and prepare the server, initial configuration steps such selecting and installing an hypervisor and hardware upgrades.
