Builds – Page 2 – Systems Lab

May 25, 2019August 23, 2020

Home Built Server Rack

In order to organize my lab a bit better, I decided to custom build a server rack. This was to be the same height as my desk and also be usable as more work surface area. I determined that a 15u rack would be the the best size, and it would give me some room to grow as well since i only currently have a few things that can fit in the rack (The Fractal Design Define XL R2 is far too big to fit, so its just the vhost, networking equipment and some RPIs). First off, the design, which ended up being slightly incorrect on sizing of one of the components.

February 18, 2018August 23, 2020

VHost Build

I started looking at servers for a new vhost for a few months, trying to determine what I would need, and what I could utilize. I was running out of RAM in my NAS to run virtual machines, and I was running into odd times when I wanted to reboot my NAS for updates, but didn’t want to reboot my entire lab. So I came to the decision to build a new server that would host the virtual machines that were less reliant on the NAS (IRC bots, websites, wiki pages, etc) as well as other more RAM intensive systems. The new server was to have a large amount of RAM (>32GB maximum), which would give me plenty of room to play. I plan on leaving some services running on the NAS which has plenty of resources to handle a few extra duties like plex, and backups. The new VHost was also to be all flash, the NAS uses a WD black drive as the virtual machine host drive, which ends up slowing down when running updates on multiple machines. I may also in the future upgrade the NAS to a SSD for its cache drive and VM drive.

Here is what I purchased:

Continue reading “VHost Build”

June 10, 2017January 17, 2025

NAS Build

I started my original NAS build with inexpensive quality consumer components, but by now its become a strange chimera of enterprise and consumer gear. The main goals: low power, quiet, high storage density

With the focus, the main decision was on a case, 8 hdd’s were the minimum number of bays, and having a few 5.25″ bays allowed me to use a 5×3 cage to add more hdd bays. From some research, it can also be found that another stack of hdd cages can be added to the case with relative ease, bringing the total number of disks held to ~21.

Case	Fractal Design Define XL R2
CPU	Intel Xeon E3-1245 v2
Motherboard	Asrock Z77 Pro-4m
PSU	Antec BP550
RAM	Gskill Ripjaws X (32GB total)
HBA	LSI 9201-16i
HDD	Various
NIC	Intel Pro/1000 VT, Chelsio dual port 10G SFP+
Extras	Norco 5 x 3.5″ HDD Cage