Topic: Reusing Resources

Home Data Center Project: Finished System

A final overview of the finished project building a home data center from 2nd hand enterprise equipment.

Read

Home Data Center Project: Persistent kernel panic and upgrading R710 BIOS

After a change of which server was using which memory sticks in my home data center project, one of the Dell R710 would continuously fail to boot any operating system typically exiting with kernel panic issues.

Read

Home Data Center Project: Setting up a VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7 on Dell R610

While building a really powerful Kubernetes cluster is useful, I decided to add further utility to the project by using VMware's vSphere ESXi on one of the servers to allow for virtualization of other operating systems.

Read

Home Data Center Project: Load balancing multiple ethernet ports

All servers within this project have 4 ethernet ports. To increase throughput in communication between each, I had to bond each of these devices to allow all devices on each server to be used, in effect quadrupling the throughput between each server.

Read

Home Data Center Project: Wiping and configuring Force10 switch

A number of ports didn't work on the Force10 switch when initially using it as a standard switch. This was likely due to having special settings based on the previous installation while also having credentials for access via the console port. This post describes getting access to the switch, wiping the settings and setting it up for the given project.

Read

Home Data Center Project: Reduction of noise on Isilon X400

After the introduction of the X400 to my home data center project, the next step was getting the server to manage it's cooling much more efficiently so that I could run the server in a household setting.

Read

Home Data Center Project: Formatting NetApp drives for normal use

This post deals with how to I managed to format NetApp drives so that they can be used in a normal context, outside of NetApp hardware.

Read

Home Data Center Project: Adding a storage server

The next step in building a home data center: adding a server to handle storage. For this purpose I picked up a 36 HDD bay, 4 unit rack-mount Isilon / EMC X400 chassis with a Supermicro X8 series motherboard. Fun ensues getting this part of the project working!!

Read