Hi there folks. I figured this is a solid place to ask this question as most of you have some pretty nice home labs.
I’m trying to consolidate my “data centers” into one and leave the 2nd one only for offsite backups.
Datacenter 1 - rack in the commercial office of a friend. 1 GB fiber (rest of business has 10 GB so my usage is negligible).
Datacenter 2 - rack in my basement closet with dedicated AC. 8 GB fiber is new to me and only reason my things were at my friend’s place is because of the upload speed.
Goal = move the vast majority of the hardware to my place while retiring as much as possible, especially the very outdated gear, while focusing on the most power-efficient gear and keeping costs low.
I’m ok selling off things to then turn around and spend it somewhere else, if that makes sense, but ideally I’d like to be net-zero cost wise. My biggest hangup right now is my Plex/Emby storage. I have a lot of legacy gear that is not 10 GB capable that I’d like to get rid of, but I don’t think I have enough rack space to move everything especially the R730XD and R710 servers, not to mention they are power hogs.
Emby/Plex storage is 200 TB useable with full data redundancy. Maybe overkill since the NAS devices already have some form of RAID 5 (ZFS, RAID 5 native, SHR), but with this setup I’m able to fully lose a NAS and continue running in read only mode until it comes back online, in addition to the storage redundancy. I leverage this with Stablebit Drive Pool with the five primary storage devices as noted in my inventory which I can DM. I can’t share links, apparently.
Right now I know I have a bit of a hot mess but trying to fix that lol. Open to any/all suggestions. Thoughts?
You’ll need to level up on the trust levels here. Unless you make a mess of it very fast, it’ll happen pretty soon™
As for your quest, I’d like to suggest considering investing in new(er), more efficient hardware running in your home rack. In practical terms, consider building in a 45Drive H15 chassis based on a cheap Chinese Intel 10th Gen clone board with HBA and refurbished 20TB enterprise drives for your co-lo spot at your friends place. This allows you to retire that old hardware and sell it off to fund the next round at home. That could be based on Asrock Rack boards for the AM4 and/or AM5 platform. Those have 10Gb NIC’s build in (some anyway) but have a price tag to match. Again, an HBA and refurbished enterprise drives will do a lot for your storage requirements.
I recommend making a list of all the things (apps) that you need/want. Find out what resources they need (you seem to run everything on Proxmox, so that should be straight forward).
E.g. It looks like a consolidation of 6 network switches into a single one may be in the realm of possibilities.
That seems to be optimistic. Are you referring to the total amount of usable storage across your 11(!) storage devices?
I recommend consolidating the largest HDDs into 1 or 2 of your Synology 8-bays, move data as necessary to consolidate storage and shut down any NAS with less than 8 bays.
I think what’s left will be ~ 84TB usable storage (6x14TB+2x14TB redundancy in one Synology 1821+, the second identical will serve as backup).
Thanks for your response! A few points of clarification (couldn’t edit my post either…ugh).
I am currently hosting VMs for myself and others be it gaming rigs, home lab virtual test environments, etc. Currently at the colo at the friend’s place, I’m at approximately 50 VMs. Many, unfortunately, have to be full fat Windows or are appliances that require heavy resources. I think my end goal state here is to go down to 5 total nodes at home and dump most of the rest if not all.
For Plex/Emby storage, I have 200 TB total across 5 NAS devices with 15 TB free at the moment. These are using 8 TB or 12/14 TB drives in a mix between TrueNAS and Synology hardware. Remember, I am duplicating all my data across the multiple systems here using Stablebit Drivepool so effectively that 200 TB is really 100 TB.
Switches, I think what I have at home is sufficient (2). I still have lots of open ports.
So, basically, you want to consolidate all of this into a single rack?
Model
CPU
GPU
RAM
Storage
Comments
Dell R430
Xeon E5-2640 v3
-
156GB
400GB
SM 5018D-FN4T
Xeon-D 1541
P2000
64GB
250GB
SM 5018D-FN4T
Xeon-D 1541
-
64GB
250GB
Gigabyte B650 1U
Epyc 4464P
-
96GB
250GB
Dell R6515
Epyc 7402P
-
128GB
2x400GB 960GB
Dell R340
Xeon E-2126G
-
16GB
500GB
Firewall
Model
CPU
GPU
RAM
Storage
Comments
Dell R6515
Epyc 7402P
-
128GB
2x400GB
Dell R710
Xeon L5640
-
48GB
128GB
Dell R430
Xeon E5-2620 v4
-
128GB
8x600GB
Nas
Asus 1U
Xeon E5-2660
-
256GB
2x 500GB
Dell R730XD
Xeon E5-2699 v3
2x P2000
128GB
2x1TB 12x8TB
Nas?
Custom
Ryzen 5950X
2x RTX 3080
64GB
4TB
Gaming
Custom
Ryzen 5950X
1080 Ti / RTX 3060
64GB
4TB
Gaming
SM 5018D-FN4T
Xeon-D 1541
-
16GB
250GB
Firewall
Ok so quite a lot of things to unpack here.
I would get rid of pretty much all Xeon based systems with a CPU older than 2017. They just draw waaay too much power for what they do. In your case that is all Xeons except for the E-3226G - that one is good enough the rest are just obsolete at this point.
Since you are bringing i all to one place, keep the Firewall in group one and ditch the one in group 2.
Storage, ditch all hard drives less than 2TB and replace with $100 2TB SSDs.
NAS, consider investing in a 1U E.1L all SSD NAS like the supermicro listed below. It saves space, power and money and 30TB SSDs are starting to reach $50 per TB in that form factor. Not cheap, but definitely better TCO numbers.
That is pretty much all the advice I have right now, hope it helps some
