My journey through the virtual world: The Homelab

Hi there vCommunity,

Now that the holidays are behind us, I can now focus on my resolutions for the coming new year! #2020baby. This has been a long time coming because as a community member one can't go without showing off their homelab. There is no time like the present, so in this post I will illustrate what I've pieced together in the past couple of years.

Once I decided what I wanted, I browsed through ebay for hours looking for the best price and hardware I can afford at the time. I've always loved rack mount equipment because of how polished hardware looked when I toured the data centers from previous and current jobs. I settled on an HP DL380 G7 and built a storage server because I didn't want all my files to reside locally. Now I needed somewhere to put this stuff, and proceeded to research DIY racks on the internet. I came across the following link as my inspiration and I had extra wood laying around the house, score!

https://tombuildsstuff.blogspot.com/2014/02/diy-server-rack-plans.html

After coming back from my local Home Depot, I was excited to get started since there wasn't much time to waste, because my newborn baby was asleep taking his nap. This was my time to knock this out. A couple of hours later, this is how the rack turned out.

Gear:

HP DL380
Netgear 1gb switch
Storage server - i3 3.2Ghz running FreeNas

Not bad I thought, so I rocked this design for about a year. A couple of months ago, I was blessed with a server rack my job was throwing away and jump at the chance of claiming it for myself (score! again). Moreover, another good friend and fellow Austin VMUG leader Joe Houghes (@jhoughes) hooked me up with another HP DL 380 for my lab. Thanks Joe you're the best. A couple of months later, now that we've moved into our new home and we have settled in. I now have this baby running on my 20amp dedicated circuit with a amp meter to see what I am drawing. I am no way near the ~20amps (more like 18) limit, but future proofed it just in case. This my setup now and there is still a lot more I want to do. I added LED strips inside the cabinet for flair (unts unts unts). Oh and graffiti provided by my kids :) Thanks for reading.

Gear: