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A brief description of the various components all conveniently assembled into a couple of stacked IKEA Lack tables...:
- The main storage bay. A USB 3.0 connected drive cage that holds 8x 3.5" drives. Holds all my private stuff such as movies, games, music etc. Has USB 3.0 and eSATA connectivity.
- The main server. Lenovo TS140 with a quadcore Intel Xeon E3-1225 v3 CPU, 32GB of ECC DDR3 RAM, 2x500GB Samsung SSD for system boot, virtual machines and software, quad port Intel gigabit network card. This server runs my website as well as virtualises my various other servers such as my gaming server, auxiliary personal backup server, lab VMs (for beta testing etc), OwnCloud appliance and even my router (pfSense) etc. The core system in my network and only one that has USB 3.0 support. Runs Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter.
- The BetaArchive FTP server. A HP N54L MicroServer equipped with a dualcore AMD Turion II Neo 2.2GHz CPU, 8GB DDR3 ECC RAM, dual-port Intel network card, 4x 4TB harddrives (BA archive)+1TB drive for system. This is where all your BA files lives. Runs Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard.
- Private backup server. A HP N54L MicroServer equipped with a dualcore AMD Turion II Neo 2.2GHz CPU, 4GB DDR3 ECC RAM, 4x 1TB harddrives+400GB drive for system. All my personal files and system recoveries are stored here. Also runs my email server and its backups. Runs Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard.
- Drive expansion bay. I use this to connect all the various loose drives I got to the BetaArchive server (using a single eSATA cable) including BetaArchive backup drives, personal backup drives etc. Since no other system has eSATA multiplier port capabilities this is the only solution. Has both USB 3.0 and eSATA connectivity and can also act as a standalone harddrive duplicator and eraser. I use this to clean and error-check all my drives before use or destruction.
Since the BA server can't hold more than 16GB of RAM it's not even nearly enough to deduplicate my BA backup drives (which are 2x8TB drives), which means I need to put them in the bottom drive expansion bay, disconnect the eSATA cable and connect the bay to the front of the main server using USB3. Then run the deduplication and then connect everything back again. Fortunately I don't need to do backups every day but it's still a mess. The BA server can just enough manage to deduplicate its 4x4TB drives if I force the deduplication process to use all available memory. A few more Win10 betas and it won't be able to do a proper deduplication anymore.
If anyone wonders, the top left box on the wall is a HP access point powered by a PoE brick. And the D-Link rack mounted box on the top is my switch where everything is connected. Again a mess
.I've had this setup for many years and never bothered to make things neater as I knew I wanted to move to better hardware.
All in all everything draws about 280-300W of power, everything is running 24/7.
Any questions?
I will be posting The New pics and descriptions once I finish installing everything. At the moment everything is assembled on the kitchen table and I am moving over all my VMs as well as virtualizing some of these physical servers to it.
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- 4-port KVM switch. This one was supposed to act as a switch between all the computers. Unfortunately I managed to fry this one with a power supply it didn't like... happy times. I will replace it soon.
- The main server. A fully upgraded HP ProLiant DL360 G7 1U rack server. This is the core system of the entire network. Runs Windows Server 2016 Datacenter. For those spec-nerds of you, this is what it got:
- Two 6-core Intel Xeon E5645 2.4GHz CPUs with Hyper-threading (a total of 24 threads).
- 288GB of ECC DDR3 RAM with 260GB usable (the rest is redundancy RAM for each channel).
- 8x 2.5" SAS/SATA slots equipped with 6x 250GB Samsung 850 Pro SSDs and two additional 1TB mechanical drives for backup, system, virtual machine storage.
- Two battery backed up LSI SAS controller cards for external drive expansion for a total of an additional 24 harddrives (see next section).
- Two power supplies that work in tandem to provide stable power.
- 4x 1000Mbit built in network interfaces with the option to upgrade them to 4x10Gbit (will upgrade to this later).
- The main storage bay. 20 bays of 3.5" SATA/SAS drives connected through a SATA>SFF-8088 interface connecting them to the main server. Holds all my private drives as well as BetaArchive FTP drives. I only use about half of them right now so plenty of expansion. This unit also holds a separate motherboard which acts as my router, unfortunately I seem to have stability issues with it so until it's resolved the router is virtualized on the main server. The software I use is pfSense, in my opinion the absolute best custom router/firewall/VPN solution you can find. I'll never go back to physical store routers again!
- Backup storage bay. Additional 4 bays of 3.5" SATA/SAS drives connected with a SFF-8470 to SFF-8088 cable to the main server. I use this for my system backups on my network. Holds 4x2TB drives configured as two mirrors (one for Windows, one for OSX).
- Backup system. This is the old server along with the old drive bays and additional USB drives. This will act as a backup system for my main drives and only powered on and run when I do a full system backup. Will eventually be replaced with a secondary rack mounted server and storage bay, but it's not a priority.
A closeup of the server before I upgraded it with extra bays.
The guts of the server. This is before the additional CPU, RAM and SAS controllers. Everything is extremely tight, and those tiny fans make a racket once things get heated up. That is why I needed to move it to a different room. I am considering a custom water cooling solution for the CPUs and RAM.
The back of the entire rig. It's a complete mess but shows how much wiring is needed for everything. But it's impossible to neat up without a rack cabinet. Makes for easy access though. Once I get a rack cabinet I will tidy up all the cabling as well. I took this pic during the moving of the server just for fun...
And here it is, finally installed in its new rack cabinet. I had to take out the back since the server was slightly longer than expected to fit all the cables, but that's not a problem and it will improve cooling. So now it's all done, and my printer fit nicely behind the monitor as well. Each server rack can now be pulled out of the cabinet without disconnecting any cables so I can do in-place upgrades and modifications without the need to remove any screws or disconnect anything. The glass door also helps dampening some of the noise but I will also add noise dampening pads on the door later to further cut the fan noise when the server is busy.
The only additions to this I will do in the future is to replace the backup server and external USB drives with rack cabinet equivalents like the main server and its disk enclosure. It will all fit nicely in this cabinet as well as there's actually more space in this than in the old custom made one, but this replacement is not a priority as the backup server is only active during backups, otherwise it's turned off. And the old IKEA tables are now sitting in a recycling center waiting to become fuel for the heating furnaces
. RIP IKEA LackRack.--------
Now time for some very important credits!
- A very big thanks to BA member dw5304 for the VERY generous donation. Without you it wouldn't been possible to get all the items in time, thanks to you I could order everything I needed right away and also add some very nice upgrades. THANK YOU! You've helped out BetaArchive in more ways than I can remember! Thanks also for providing the very much needed Windows Server license!
- Many thanks to Andy for sticking by and helping out diagnosing all the weird errors I had during the setup and for making all the adjustments to BetaArchive needed to make this new setup running. You really make BetaArchive run and I doubt many people realise how much work is needed to make everything run smoothly!
- To all the BetaArchive members helping out making this community grow and also making sure that I need to run to the store getting more and larger harddrives .
Lastly, here are a pile of rotten eggs especially dedicated to:
- The Scandinavian postal system PostNord. You're a complete mess. You can hardly deliver any packages right and I had to chase my packages all across the city because you failed to notify me when they arrived, and also sent them to postal offices that were on the other side of the city. There are FOUR postal offices within 100m from me, get it right next time!
- Various chinese sellers on eBay. Get your tracking numbers right please. It's hard enough having to wait between 3 weeks and 2 months for a delivery but even harder not being able to track the package until it's arrived. Good thing you respond to my messages at least!
- The universe. Placing the planets in such a way that I am only limited to 24 hours a day. Too little time to do what I need to do. Thanks for existing though! .
. Still, congrats, hope the new one is better.
