4 blades? Jesus those must be old. I thought 800w idle with 3 UCS b200 m3 blades in a UCS mini was bad…
I’m now running 3 dell r630’s with dual 10 core e5 v4, 384gb ddr4 and 8x 1.92tb SSDs and it’s under 400w idle with 12 or so VMs running
~550w Nexus 9k 48p 10g 6p 40g 3x dell r630, 2x 10c e5 2640 v4, 384gb ram, 1x 960gb nvme ssd and 5x 1.92tb sata SSDs
Though it may change soon… not for the better
I’ve got 8 dell r630’s, hp dl380 g9, and 2x 2u 4 node supermicro chassis all running e5 v4 CPUs in my lab. Still supported by the current build of VMware, they run great and are relatively power efficient. I do have 4 Xeon gold servers, however I havnt even fired them up because they aren’t much better than the v4’s (only v1 scalable) but I probably will eventually when VMware ups the hardware requirements.
I don’t know where you are at, but in most countries with eBay or probably anywhere else, buy the server barebones, or with really low spec components (low ram and even v3 CPU’s) and upgrade it yourself. I find this to be a lot cheaper than buying it prebuilt with identical specs.
For example, my dl380 g9 came with a single v3 Xeon, I bought a 12 core e5 2650 v4 for literally $4.79 shipped to my door. Flashed the new bios and I was off and running. I also can pickup as much ram as I want for ~$7 per 8gb ddr4 dimm or $12 for 16gb dimm on eBay all day long (us prices obviously but it still should be cheaper to buy low spec or barebones outside the Us and upgrade)
Use rapid tables, enter in your wattage and hours per day, if you put in your power cost it will even give you a monthly and yearly bill. Just google “power cost calculator”