Noob with a Dell power edge who wants to learn to mine for fun

[agalinauskas]

Hello all, I am looking for some advice.

I have a 5 or so year old Dell Power Edge server. I have used it primarily for messing around for esxi VM's. I wanted to set up a mining server. What are some easy to mine coins that I could start with. I am not looking to turn a profit per se, just want to learn the in's and outs of cryptocurrency mining. There is no GPU on the rig it's just a quad core xenon at 3.4 ghz I believe. Am I better off running it as a VM or just install an OS on the server and run it that way? How much electricity will this draw going 24/7?

TLDR
I have a free server and want to dick around with easy to mine crypto currencies but have no idea where to start. Not looking to profit looking to learn.

[modzer0]

Monero. CPU mining works quite well with it. Check out the xmr-stak-cpu miner - https://github.com/fireice-uk/xmr-stak-cpu. I use it on a few family PCs that are always running anyway, and it works quite well. I use monerohash.com as my pool, but there are others as well - miningpoolhub has a Monero pool with a lower fee (only 0.9%) and other neat features like auto-trading your mined coins to another coin of your choice.