Home Network Upgrade Progress 2022 Edition | New Server & Storage, Additional Rack, and more…
Since the previous post around 18 months ago here, a lot has changed in my home / home business server & network infrastructure…
I had purchased and upgraded a Dell Precision R5500 from the Facebook Marketplace, was using a Cisco IronPort C170 running Sophos UTM9, and had added a 10G 16 port UniFi switch to the network.
Well the Cisco IronPort C170 running Sophos UTM9 still exists, but its now located in my DR site – yes, I now have a DR site again (I had one years ago, but for non-technical related reasons, it became too difficult and toxic to use, so removed it).
The Dell Precision R5500 is now my desktop workstation in my home office being used as my daily driver workstation for all IT related works.
And the 10G 16 port switch now has a twin! I got an additional identical switch, bonded the 4x 10G RJ45 ports on each switch, set the LAG as the switch trunk and they’re connected together using this LAG.
So, with the IronPort C170 and Precision R5500 repurposed – what do I have now??
The IronPort C170 has been replaced by a pair of real Sophos hardware firewalls – an XG330 R2 and SG310 R2 (both running UTM9 in HA). the two 10gb SFP+ ports on each are bonded as the network trunk with a port from each firewall going to each 10gb switch.
I now have a Dell PowerEdge R720xd with:
- 2x Intel Xeon E5-2670 CPUs with a total of 16 cores, 32 threads
- 256GB DDR3-1600MHz ECC Server RAM
- 2x Samsung 860 Pro 256GB SSDs mirrored as the boot drive
- 2x Samsung 860 Evo 2TB SSDs mirrored as the primary storage for the majority of the virtual machines
- 4x HP 1.2TB 10K RPM SAS disks in RAID10 which until recently, hosted my NextCloud instance
- 2x WD SATA 4TB 5400 RPM disks mirrored to contain temp / dump data held temporarilty only
- Dell H710p mini SAS RAID Controller for the internally mounted disks mentioned above
- 2x Dell H810 RAID controllers, each has dual 6gpbs SAS ports for external storage expansion (more on that below)
- 1x Intel Quad 10gb NIC with all four ports bonded, and connected in pairs to each of the two 10g switches
- 1x Emulex 8gbps dual port fibre channel HBA controller card which is connected to a pair of Dell EMC 24 port FC switches (with 16 ports licensed & activated) used for the now retired FC SAN.
I mentioned storage – yes, I used to have a bunch of random 2TB disks sitting losely on top the R5500 in the rack connected to the LSI 9201 SAS HBA – which worked pretty well, except Microsoft Storage spaces basically completely sucks and isn’t production ready yet.
I breifly used a Promise Technologies E630fd fibre channel SAN with 16x 2TB SAS HDDs in RAID 10 as my primary storage for my file server and a couple of my larger VMs. It ran VERY well, but it also ran VERY loudly and was impossible to have located in the house, and even parked out in the garage, it was still slightly audible from in the house late at night when I was asleep.
Now I have a pair of Promise Technologies J630 SAS expander disk shelves that were primarily designed to add additional storage to the Promise E630fx SAN, but as they don’t contain any compute apart from the minimum requirement for SAS expansion, they run a lot quieter & cooler.
One J630 is loaded up with 16x 3TB HGST 7.2K RPM SAS disks in RAID 10 – providing about 23TB of usable high speed storage
The second J630 is loaded up with 16x 4TB WD RED NAS drives also in RAID 10 – providing around 32TB of usable storage for backups. Both of these are connected to the two Dell H810 RAID cards.
Due to the amount of equipment and the amount of heat generated, I decided to relocate servers & storage to a dedicated enclosed full size rack located in my workshop as the dedicated server room cannot dicipate that much heat quickly enough when the door is closed.
All host servers are running Windows Server with Hyper-V – hosting a various number of mixed VMs containing Windows, CentOS, Debian and Ubuntu.
I have also added:
- Additional UPSes for battery backup
- QNAP 1u 4bay backup to handle only laptop & desktop backups
- Dell PowerEdge R230 with 4x 12TB Seagate IronWolf Pro disks in RAID 10 for Plex
- More fibre runs
- More cable management
Server Room:
Server Room:
- The Dell R610 located in this rack is surplus / spare.
DR Site:
The DR site contains another Promise J630 with 16x 4TB WD RED disks in RAID 10 to contain a replica of my backups, this is connected to a Dell H810 installed in a Dell PowerEdge R610 server
The DR site also has an APC 3KVA UPS, the Cisco IronPort C170 with UTM9 (soon to be replaced with a real Sophos), and a switch.
I also just picked up a second J630 unit with 16x 3TB SAS disks which will contain a replica of all data sitting on the same unit at home.
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