Datacenter in home ? Why ?
So a natural question would be why for whatever reason you would like to build a “datacenter” ( quoted on purpose ) in your piece location of home. Well for 99.9% of people the answer would be “I would never have one“. Well I’m in that 0.1% and the reason is simple … well its even more than one. Its passion to IT and the drive to learn & do cool stuff.
For this reason several things at the piece of my home has changed:
- Internet connection is now upgraded to fibre of 0.5 GB
- Public IP address space of /29
- Internal home network secured with customised APUboard to be edge router
- Managed switch to introduce VLANs
- Strong wireless with ubiquiti
- And I think the most interesting ….. the server
Networking with “learn as you go”
Since apart of just application/server/development I also try to do electronics and this subject is also interesting for me I decided that router given to me by my provider is far away from being “cool” and fully under my control. So I started off with good old desktop station. But that kicked me back to so called “router on a stick”
Since I wanted to have better experience I decided to move on and by pure luck I found this board . And since then I already have 3 of them. How come ? Well they just connect much more than just networking. I can use them to learn linux kernel patching skills / I can use that board to connect world of software into world of electronic devices made by me and what else …. ohhh yes … and its my gigabit ethernet port (3x of them ) edge router which in return allows me to learn all tricks about networking/routing/vlans/troubleshooting 🙂
If that would not be enough I harvested my old dell laptop and plugged in Erricson Mobile Modem (3G) which now gives me alternative internet in case of failure 🙂 wow + wow + wow 🙂
So here is how one looks like without enclosure
And there it is 🙂 If you would have any questions about this small devil – just let me know 🙂 I will be happy to try provide you with more answers.
That was fun – but where is the server ?
So the whole point of here would be having a server which I strongly believe is not about “how much did it cost ?” but all about “what can you learn on it?“. If you already see this difference then ur one step ahead of others most probably.
Now at this point I will not be pretending that I know hardware really well … I don’t 🙂 and thats why good friend of mine with super uber eXperience has helped me to put together a kit list which turned out to be a great server for learning purposes. Below you can see table of what we have concluded to be best :
| Type | Product | Comments | Link |
|---|---|---|---|
| Motherboard | Asus Q170M2 | Chosen of 2 build in ethernet ports | https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Q170M2/ |
| PSU | Corsair VS550 – 550W | To have enough of spare power | |
| Enclosure | Antec ISK 600m | Just cause it looks cool 🙂 | |
| HDD ( data ) | HGST 4TB 3.5″ 7200RPM | 3x of them – RAID5 – used for data | |
| HDD ( os ) | HGST 500GB 2.5″ 7200RPM | 2x of them – RAID1 – used for OS | |
| Processor | Intel I7 6700 | To get the most out of it | |
| Memory | Hyper Fusion [email protected] 16GB | 4xthem – to max out the board. Max the fun |
Now this is what we call server for fun. At this stage you would ask what will be running on that box …. well KVM for virtualisation and openVswitch to play around with SDN.
So was it scary to put it all together ?
Ohhh hell it was 🙂 I felt like getting really fragile lego pieces and the fact of me being so excited didn’t really help 🙂 So I’m attaching couple of better photos during the build out up till the first boot 🙂 enjoy!
Thats it for now folks 🙂
Hope you enjoyed this short adventure. We will be using those toys mentioned in this post quite soon and will definitely have more fun! So stay tuned!