So, for those who haven't been following me on Mastodon, I have slowly been getting into having a homelab of sorts. I've almost always had some sort of server at home, but those have mainly been LAMP installs for web design and hosting. I've also dabbled a bit in Docker and other container connected things but this is the first time I've been setting up multiple virtual machines within a single host.
After moving to Spain into an apartment I was able to buy a used HP Z420 tower from eBay with a Xeon E5-2680 CPU that has 10 cores and 20 threads and 64GB of ECC RAM. That meant I was able to utilize the server to host multiple, heavy load servers and systems with Proxmox. Currently I am running 5 LXC containers and 5 VMs on it and utilizing about 5% of the CPU on average except for when I turn things to 11 and turn on the other 7 VMs I only need time from time. One of these VMs is an install of TrueNAS Scale and has 4x 4TB 3.5" HDDs connected via passthrough. On it we keep most of our data.
Rackmount
However, we got new things! I got a 16U 19" rack cabinet on casters that now house our stuff, and we added another server to the mix. I got us a 4U case that I bought components for to make a new TrueNAS Scale server and move the 4x 4TB drives from the Proxmox server. The Proxmox server is now on its side in the cabinet to take up less space than it standing up. I plan to check out and measure how tall the motherboard+CPU+Cooling in the Z420 is, to try and see if I could get away with moving the components from the Z420 tower case to a 2U case. But I also plan on, further down the line, to swap out that machine for another. I'd like to have 3x Proxmox machines in high availability using Ceph at some point and have them be at most 1-2U if at all possible.
The only thing about the cabinet I got is that it is for audio equipment, if you look at the image here above you'll see that it only has screw holes instead of rectangular shaped holes for the classic rackmount screws and bolts. This also meant that the spacing between holes on the cabinet and the 4U server don't match. Which is ok, the 4U case is a bit deeper than the cabinet so it sits well at the backend whilst two screws hold the front up. It's not going anywhere.
Future plans
First of all, I would love to upgrade to a 2.5Gbps switch instead of the small 6 port 1Gbps switch I have in the cabinet. And I would also like, as stated above, to set up three Proxmox machines for load balancing and backup with high availability.
Basically, I am a nerd and I will always want new stuff to play with and learn. Aren´t we all?