Homelab

The natural progression from renting servers and VPS’s must be creating your own rack, setting up and maintaining your own servers/network in your own homelab right?

I’ve started down this journey anyway, bought a 25u Startech open rack, 2 x dell r710s, 2 x dell r410, 1 x 1u supermicro and some networking gear.

The r710s are fit like so;

main

2x Intel Xeon E5540 @ 2.53GHz
72gb DDR3 ECC ram
iDRAC 6 Enterprise
Dell PERC 6/i RAID 
2x 146gb sas
870w psu

spare

2x Intel Xeon E5530 @ 2.40GHz
16gb DDR3 ecc ram
two bent 570 psu's
motherboard, caddys, no idrac or raid

Got another 2x iDRAC 6 enterprise and Dell PERC raid cards on the way. Plan is to have second one ready to go live if needed while having spares for either. Awaiting word back from the seller of the second r710 too as two of the PSU’s arrived bent, box must have taken a knock. 3 more dell 146gb sas drives are on the way too.

First things first will be moving a bunch of stuff off my OVH box to the new r710 under ESXi and VMs. Radarr, Sonarr, Ombi, plexpy (plex will have its own server, more on that later) ZNC, teamspeak and other bits and bobs. I’ll be moving a bunch of my websites over too, probably all of them.

The 1u supermicro, I was going to use for pfsense or opnsense, but I instead changed my mind and ordered an ubiquiti edgerouter x from Canada which should arrive shortly and an ubiquiti AP AC PRO. Networking covered under a rack mount TP link TL SG1024, 24 port gigabit switch.

The 2x Dell r410s are for experimenting, they’re lower spec with only 4gb ram each but I aim to get more efficient CPU’s and 16gb ram in each to proper screw around with them.

As for Plex, I have another server in a standard tower that I’m looking to shove into it’s own rack case. Haven’t decided which but there’s no immediate need for this as our home broadband can’t yet support it. I’ll also be looking for a 24 bay 4u case soon to house the 70tb (so far) libraries. The drives can wait but I want it setup and ready so it can grow into it.

Might have to upgrade from netdata too to a more robust monitoring system, I love netdata but I’ll need something more centralised - I wasn’t the biggest fan of zabbix so maybe nagios & graphana will be a good option. Lots to learn in the coming months. Will take some pics and attach them too as it comes along.

So far the rack is built, both r710s (with rails!) are attached and booting. I’ve already installed ESXI on the main server, but haven’t yet figured out how to update the firmware - beginning to think it was shipped updated but I’ll find out soon enough anyway.

Thanks reddit ….