I made some updates and upgrades to my original homelab a few months back, but it was time to needlessly waste time and money make some absolutely essential upgrades.
Starting out with a small rolling server rack (12U tall I think? Maybe 10U) and, once assembled, added a patch panel and started running network cables through it.
In addition it includes a rack mounted managed switch, rack mount Pi holder, and a shelf to place the two Wyse 5070 thin clients.
I cut down a bit of MDF and placed the new centerpiece of my homelab on it, a Dell T420 server.
The server was bumped up to the fastest processors it would support, giving me 2x 10 core 2.40ghz CPUs, and filling out all the RAM channels with 192gb of ECC RAM.
Additionally storage was filled out as much as I could manage, the 8 bays are filled with:
- 4x 4tb disks in a RAID5 ZFS pool (12tb usable storage)
- 4x 16tb disks in a RAID10 ZFS pool (32tb usable storage)
and a few SSD’s where I could find plugs for them.
I finished plugging everything in, added a large APC UPS (we get frequent power blips where I live, at some point I really should get on a generator for the computer equipment – future project blog coming up lol).
Next immediate steps are to rework some of the networking equipment, the TP-Link Deco mesh router is a pretty nice piece of kit, but really does not afford much ability to control or handle traffic on it. At some point, an actual hardware firewall and switching the Deco to just act as an access point is on my to-do list.
On the software side the main server and thin clients run Proxmox with a couple primary VMs (OpenMediaVault to manage the NAS stores, general Debian VM to handle Docker containers, etc). Next up on that side is I’d like to try and cluster the systems together and create a Kubernetes cluster on the thin clients.