New Homelab rebuild!

Finished photo first

This was the old lab. The PC in the custom case was running VMWare with vsphere and ESXi. It had a Dell h700 and 8 wd reds. However unfortunately the airflow sucked in that case and ended up killing two drives. That was part of what pushed me to build a storage server. The HP was running pfsense.

I ended up getting an old board I had sitting around finally working and decided I would try to build a SAN. so this is my alpha concept. It was running freenas in a Ubiquity box that I carved up , added standoffs and stuff

Pic from the other side

Getting started with the rebuild. I went with the Rosewill RSV-L4412 case because I wanted hotswap.

Dropped in the motherboard and added a dell h310. I flashed it to IT mode and then to an LSI-9211-8i using this guide here https://techmattr.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/updated-sas-hba-crossflashing-or-flashing-to-it-mode-dell-perc-h200-and-h310/.

Everything all wired up in my NAS

Last minute before I racked it, my work was junking this ASUS H77 Mobo, 3770 and 32 GB of ram. I guess my NAS is getting a transplant

And here is my ESXi server after the rebuild. I ended up just doing this one and have less pictures

All wired up. This guy is running an ASUS x79 board with a 3790k (also a salvage from work) and 64 GB of RAM.

Not pictured, I ended up adding 10 GBE cards after racking them because the mobo that went in the SAN had more PCIe slots and would support it where my old board didn't

The new rack is built. I picked up this startech for $250 from Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/StarTech-com-Adjustable-Levelers-Management-4POSTRACK25U/dp/B00O6GNLQE

Servers racked

Glamour shot

Equipment all in

Wiring everything up

And its done!

I ended up finding a convenient place to mount my modem. I had issues in my last setup with it sliding all over the place because of the stiffness of the coax cable so i wanted it solid

The lifeline with the killawatt

A side shot with the KVM hooked up, powerstrip screwed in and all the cables managed

A shot from behind, plus dog tax!