Major HomeLab Upgrade: Adding 3 Dell PowerEdge R630 Servers and Installing VMware ESXi 7.0.3

I got a sweet deal on these Dell PowerEdge R630 that I bought as a lot on eBay. I purchased them for $210/ server and its going to be a major upgrade compared to my single R530 running unraid. Specs

• Dell PowerEdge R630

• 8x2.5" drive bays

• 2 Xeon E5-2630L v3, 8 core 16 thread, low power only 55W TDP

• 64GB DDR4 ECC

• Dual 750W PSU

• iDRAC Enterprise

First up I'll be setting all the iDRAC IPs with my Startech USB KVM that I got from Dell. This is really convent because I don't need a monitor or keyboard I just plug the USB cable into my laptop and everything is built into the software

Now for the fun part of pulling the whole rack out, installing the rails and servers and cabling everything nice and neat

But boy do they look in the rack. For drives im currently just using cheap consumer drives that I got from Micro Center. Slot 0 is a 250gb boot drive for ESXI and slots 1-3 are a 1tb ssd in a hardware RAID 5 on the perc controller. Down the road, I will probably upgrade this to enterprise drives and vSAN, but for my needs now it fine.

Now for IPMI Dell has the best management software in the business I think, every single option or reading you could possibly want is in iDRAC and UPDATES are FREE HPE. So installing VMware ESXI was very simple just download the image from VMware and open up the KVM and mount the ISO file and boot off the virtual CD.