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2020 - Time for a rack

Lock down happened. What better way to spend the idle time than to DIY a wooden server rack?

The wooden server rack is made from 2x4s, which I got laying around, long before the pandemic skyrocket the cost of wood.

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Drawer rails from Home Depot works well as rails for servers.

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From top to bottom:

  • 24-Port Patch Panel, using Keystone RJ45 Pass-through Jacks
  • Cisco SG200-52P PoE Gigabit Switch
  • 1U empty server case, used as a rack shelf, for holding the pfSense Mini PC
  • 2U ESXI DMZ Server
    • Runs Minecraft, Plex, Resume Website, and Wordpress Blog
    • Intel i7-4790K
    • 32GB (4x8) DDR3 RAM
    • Asus Z97 Motherboard
    • 3x 256GB SSD as ESXI Datastore
    • Nvidia P400 for Plex Transcoding
  • 4U ESXI Main Server
    • Runs TrueNAS, Unifi Controller, Pi-Hole, and a bunch of Winodws and Linux VMs
    • Dual Intel Xeon E3-2650L
    • 128GB (16x8) DDR3 ECC RAM
    • AsRock Rack EP2C602-4L/D16 Motherboard
    • LSI 9300 HBA card for all the HDDs
    • 2x 1TB SSD as ESXI Datastore
  • APC 1500VA UPS
  • CyberPower 1500VA UPS

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As COVID continues to rage on, my brother moved back home from college. His server equipment are added to the DIY rack.

Now there's one more 4U server, along with a few Raspberry Pi 3s.

Previously, I run Pi-Hole inside a VM on the ESXI host. With the Raspberry Pis as the physical Pi-Hole server, I don't have to worry about not having DNS resolution when I do maintenance on the ESXI Hosts.

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