My finished home lab web-stack for hosting

Little_Crow · 14 Feb 2013 at 20:45

I am a particular fan of the rubberised damping system for your homebrew box.
Well done, Sir.

HarryPainful · 14 Feb 2013 at 21:31

Shad · 15 Feb 2013 at 08:09

HarryPainful said:
UPS?

That's next on the list, but I don't feel too happy about an additional 30-40Kg sat up in the loft. It would need careful placement at the very least.

jaybee · 17 Feb 2013 at 13:39

30-40kg? Mine weighs maybe 20kg at the most. As for loft taking the weight...surely with boards down...they can take a humans weight so... ?

daz · 17 Feb 2013 at 14:39

Any reason why you're going for HaProxy -> pfSense -> Zen Load Balancer ?

I would have pfsense first and then your load balancer, it seems pointless to have load balancer, firewall, load balancer?

Shad · 17 Feb 2013 at 18:05

jaybee said:
30-40kg? Mine weighs maybe 20kg at the most. As for loft taking the weight...surely with boards down...they can take a humans weight so... ?

I need about 1400VA to make sure everything can run under load for enough time to survive a brief outage as well as shutdown safely, so I'm looking at a 3u APC unit which is about 31Kg. It would probably be fine as you say, quite a bit less than a human. But it still makes me nervous

daz said:
Any reason why you're going for HaProxy -> pfSense -> Zen Load Balancer ?

I would have pfsense first and then your load balancer, it seems pointless to have load balancer, firewall, load balancer?

The HAProxy server is external to my network and is mainly there so that I can serve a useful message should my network be unreachable or unable to serve pages (there have been situations in the recent past where Virgin Media have left me without a connection for anything from a few minutes, to several hours or a couple of days - it's rare but it does happen). It also has the happy side effect of hiding my IP address, as well as giving me somewhere to host static content

nickcardwell · 18 Feb 2013 at 10:57

Surely heat in the loft would kill the batteries in the UPS?

Shad · 18 Feb 2013 at 13:09

nickcardwell said:
Surely heat in the loft would kill the batteries in the UPS?

Quite possibly, I hadn't considered that. I'd have thought the cold wouldn't be that good for them either. All good reasons not to worry about a UPS just yet!

VirtualControl · 18 Mar 2013 at 13:23

Just stumbled on your thread here... very interesting

Just thought I'd pass on my comments - we've now moved on to Dell R710's and these are much more performant and use less energy than the old 2950's - so if you ever get the chance to pick another server, try them (I've no experience with HP, etc)

I'd also make sure that you enable every single power saving feature in the BIOS - and in ESXi! That means that you're not pumping out loads of heat (and saving electricity!) - I know this is an overclocking forum, but hey...

Also, from past experience, those 2950's are built like tanks... they'll survive hotter environments than a UK summer (even in an attic), BUT, you're seriously shortening their lifespan... worst case scenario = condensation

Also... make sure you get some kind of server management in there - There's a plugin for VMware which allows you to monitor the Dell hardware... might be good to know about.

Shad · 18 Mar 2013 at 15:01

Thanks - I think rather than upgrading to an R710 I'll probably duplicate my AMD Phenom based server and convert my 2950 to a fibre channel target. Should be able to play with FT and vmotion then.

Good shout on the monitoring though, already have that setup in vSphere (although I don't seem to receive emails from it), and have OpenManage on one of the VMs to get a bit more detail for things like the storage arrays.

RimBlock · 20 Mar 2013 at 09:48

Shad said:
The heat is an issue I have to keep a close eye on though. Winter so far has been fine, no condensation issues. Summer last year was interesting. We had external temperatures of over 25 degrees and in the loft it was very hot indeed - unbearable as you say. The temps in the servers didn't go above around 35 degrees, which although is very hot, didn't seem to be a problem. A little bit of air movement as well as keeping the loft hatch open during the day seemed to help quite a bit.

This does make me smile, in a nice way of course...

Ambient temp where my rack is (standard room with ceiling fan) tends to be around 32 degrees

. The inside of the rack is usually around 35 degress most of the time.

32 degrees is the threshold for the ML110 G7 I have but it sits there happily chugging away. Not sure how my C6100 will change matters having 8x L5520s in it but nothing much has changed (apart from the noise level) since I put it in and I can always put a blower at the bottom of the rack if needed.

Whilst heat can affect the servers I would not be too worried around those ranges.

RB