Well, the first step is realizing it’s okay not to use it. My homelab is a mix of salvaged mini PCs and prosumer networking gear. It has nothing to do with the 6/7 figure gear I use at work, and I prefer it that way. Its simpler and lower stakes, is quieter, and uses way less power.

That all said, it’s a great server. if you do want to use it, there are many ways to start. First, you don’t need to plug both power supplies in, but you can. The server can run entirely on one of them. It has two in case one fails it can keep running, not because it needs 2x the power. For the monitor, yes you will likely need VGA. Servers rarely have modern video ports, because vga just works, costs nothing to add to a server, and is almost never used. Most of your physical interaction with a server should be though “out of band,” which dell calls “idrac.” This is a seperate networking port labeled on the server that lets you connect to a local website, put in a password, and then fully control the server. That includes powering it on, reboots, loading disc image iso files, on and on. The idrac will stay powered even when the server is off.

You may or may not have qn idrac license for that server. If you dont and your boss can’t give you one, you can use something like jetkvm instead when it’s released.

As to what to do either it, i would recommend installing different hypervisors or kubernetes suites and playing around. Proxmox, xcp-ng, k3s, harvestor, on and on. Once you find one you like, figure out how to use automation software to setup VMs and containers, like cloudinit, terraform, ansible, or nixOS.

Good luck, and enjoy. Getting started from scratch can be a lot, but it can also be a lot of fun. Go into it expecting to fail, fail a lot and try to learn what you like. That’s the best thing a homelab can do for you.

Servers aren’t all that different from regular PCs. Plug in at least one PSU, boot install media, install your OS and off you go.

The neatest feature is the idrac. Hook that up to the network (and use the front panel to make sure it’s on DHCP) and you can do a lot of remote control, even get a virtual console, just like having a monitor, mouse, and keyboard.

Note that the R720 is rather old at this point. I’d install Windows first, and put the service tag in on Dell’s support site, and update all the firmware. There are other ways, but that one requires the least fiddling.

Also, once you have it up and running, you can see power consumption in the idrac.

And the fans will be pretty loud, so you’ll want to set up the idrac and use ipmitool to control them. I used to set mine to about 20%. You will need to do this on each cold boot (but not warm reboots). https://serverfault.com/questions/1025601/control-or-reduce-fan-speed-of-dell-r820

If you don’t want it, I’ll take it off your hands. I have a rack designed for that kind of hardware and all of the infrastructure to fully support it.

I’d start with proxmox.

Keep in mind that even at idle, running a rack mount server like this 24/7 can cost $20+ dollars to operate per month.

The multiple power supplies are for redundancy. It will work with one plugged in but you are “supposed” to plug in both.

It’s fundamentally not that different from a consumer desktop. Plug in a monitor and a keyboard and a USB with your preferred flavor of headless Linux installer on it. Configure ssh as the first thing you do because you won’t want to plug the monitor and keyboard into it every time you need to tweak something.

You can probably find VGA to HDMI adapters if you can’t find a monitor with VGA support.

depending on specs it will be a little power hungry, but a good virtualization platform.

yes, the power supplies are likely redundant and the server will complain if they are not both powered.

it will use a VGA connection, but you should be ale to find cheap VGA monitors or cheap adapters.

RAID controllerfor those drives? how many processors and cores? how much RAM? what OS are you planning on running on it? iDRAC included? (if so, likely idrac6, but still usable)

this hardware is very well supported by linux - I have used these older servers extensively. your boss was right to be excited for you. its a great exploration platform that you will be able to do lots of things with.

fire up a live linux distro and get detailed specs on the box - that will guide what you can play with right away.

typically you only need one power supply to run it, once you move to redundant power you can use the second one in case the first one fails. when you plug both in it will just balance across both until one fails.

in my opinion, hardware should only be hypervisors that run virtual machines, then you can provision VMs, similar to using VPSs. going this route you will need a vga monitor for initial setup, eventually everything is done over the lan with a web ui or ssh.

i use proxmox which is Debian based for the hypervisor.

As far as what you do with it, is that you can in theory replace the VPSs or test software in your lan.

to compare, i have my router (vyos), homeassistant, a docker server for hosting small services, a network lab (gns3), windows and mac VMs, and more running on a cluster that is using similar hardware.

That thing is power hungry. Don’t even plug it in if you’re not even sure you need to use it for anything. It’ll cost you plenty in electricity just to have it idling.

What’s the drive config? If it’s a SAS raid, you’ll probably want to look up how to flash it to IT mode so it’s not doing hardware RAID. I’d install Proxmox in a RAID 10 ZFS configuration and go to town.

Its just a computer, nothing more. You would do exactly the same thing as you would on a desktop or vps.

No you do not have to plug in both power cords but if both aren’t plugged in it may blare an alarm. If so plug in the other or just remove the redundant PSU.