I’m looking at my new server’s IDRAC console and it’s idling at 260 watts. That seems high to me. I’m new to this so some help would be appreciated. It only has ESXI 7 installed, no virtual guests yet. So nothing really requiring processor power. Thank you!
2x E5-2650 v3
32GB Ram
12x 4TB SAS drives
2 extra NICs
I think your answer lies with the 12 SAS drives.
My r730 sits at 180-200 watts with a handful of VM’s running and 8 4TB SAS drives. Your numbers seem reasonable.
With that amount of drives and extra NICs it sounds fairly expected.
I’ve just bought a R730XD with 12x6TB 3,5 SAS in the front, 4x4TB 3,5 SATA inside, 2x300GB 2,5 SAS in the back and 3 controller cards. It was 300W+ on idle running fresh proxmox, no VMs. Took the cards out because i don’t plan to use them yet and were running hot, and the consuption dropped to 255W. Planning to take some HDDs out to have some spares after planning the TrueNAS/VMs i want to use. A little sad about it because the 12 drive bays in the front packed full with hdds looks really nice.
Yeah, the SAS drives are fairly power hungry.
Look into power capping if you have the enterprise license for your iDRAC.
Make sure you are on the os controlled power plan.
The drives are definitely the ones eating all that electricity.
For comparison, I have a r730 LFF 192 Gb mem, Xeon 2690 v4, 12 VMs, 3 SSDs, ESXI 7 and it eats about 98 watts.