Where does he get all those wonderful toys?!

Welcome to the first installment of my first big project for the site: my nerd-tastic journey to build an advanced home computing lab.

The primary purpose for assembling this technological terror is so that I will have easy access to a platform for testing out virtualization, cloud, container, and automation systems. Per my job, I do need to be able to tinker with OpenStack, OpenShift, Ansible, and KVM virtualization (and 2 of those really require hardware, otherwise I’d just stick with using AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud). Speaking of my job, a quick Internet shout-out to my co-workers for all their advice and input which helped me shape the final design (Chris, Rob, and Sean).

In the initial planning phase I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to balance between budget, performance, longevity, and power/noise requirements. Basically, I wanted to get the most performance that would last me a good while, without completely breaking the bank either in upfront costs or on-going electricity bills, and I wanted the whole setup to be insanely quiet. Ultimately, the bill of materials below is what I decided to use for the lab.

To summarize… The lab will consist of two SuperMicro E300-8D servers with 128GB of RAM and a 250GB NVMe local disk, which will serve as virtualization hypervisors. For additional storage, the Synology DiskStation will be primed with a little shy of 1.5TB worth of SSD and a dual 10Gb SFP+ adapter, which will allow the servers to access it over NFS through a dedicated 10Gb network. The servers have multiple Gigabit Ethernet ports, so each will connect to the SG200-26 switch for both an administration VLAN and a virtual machine traffic VLAN (the Synology will also have a connection to the administration VLAN). Also, since everything has enough onboard Gigabit NICs, I’m hoping to set up bonded pair NICs for the non-storage networks.

As of today, not all the hardware and cabling has arrived, but as the photo above shows, I have received a decent pile of kit so far… and I couldn’t hold off any longer. Since everything arrived that I needed for the Synology DiskStation, I decided to get the initial hardware setup out of the way.

Fresh out of the box, with 3 SSDs waiting to be installed
Final SSD ready to be slotted into place

The SSD installation was a piece of cake to complete, and it was basically 3 steps: remove drive bay, attach SSD via 4 screw mounting holes, slide drive bay back into place. I suppose the 4th step was to use the keys to lock the drive bay in place to avoid accidentally popping loose any of the in-use bays.

The dual SFP+ port PCI-e adapter
4 Gigabit ports and 2 newly installed SFP+ 10Gb ports

Installing the dual SFP+ PCI-e adapter card was a little more involved than I thought it was going to be, but not to imply that it was difficult. The way that the blank was held it place made it appear that it was something you could remove and slide the card in place. However, the process actually involved taking the cover off the DiskStation, seating the PCI-e card, securing via the supplied screw, and popping the cover back in place. So basically, the exact process you’d go through in a regular server or PC.

I haven’t powered anything on to run through the initial setup, but that’s mostly because I want to get the network configured first (I have diagrams drawn up for that part). I’m waiting on a few more cables to arrive later in the week, so until then the real network setup is on the back burner (at which point I’ll explain the “donated” equipment). However, I believe the SuperMicro servers and NVMe drives should be arriving before then, so I might set aside some time to get that hardware squared away as well.

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