I recently inherited a Dell PowerEdge R540, but I'm unsure of its age. It seems to be operational, and I'm considering deploying a Veeam Hardened Repository ISO on it. To make it suitable, I plan on adding some large 3.5-inch disks for about 70TB of storage and a bit of RAM. My main question is: do you think it's worth investing the time and effort into this setup?
5 Answers
We've got a similar setup with a Dell R730, and it works great! We installed Ubuntu and configured it as a Veeam hardened repository. One tip: keep a spare disk around for quick swaps in case of failure, since you don’t want to risk downtime.
If you're looking to set this up as secondary backup storage for a small business, go for it! But if it's for production use, I’d advise against it. There’s a risk of issues happening on unsupported hardware, and you don't want to explain that to the higher-ups when something goes wrong.
Make sure to check the Dell support site with the service tag; it'll give you details on its age and original components. Also, confirm the Veeam repo compatibility with that hardware on their KB pages. Generally, if it runs Rocky Linux, it should work!
There's definitely still some life left in a PowerEdge R540! It's a solid choice for a non-production environment or even a home lab to test things out.
The Dell R540 was released in 2017, so it still has a decent lifespan. If your budget is tight and getting new equipment is tough, then I think your plan is smart. It might not be under warranty, but used parts are easy to find if something goes wrong.
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