re-organization of my multi-site homelab deployment – Part 2: Office location retirement

By Mikey StolzUncategorized

This morning i finished writing the first post in the series which explained the current plans and progress on the Primary datacenter and i thought i would also write this one. This will be a short story about this location and why i have retired it. Well actually the retirement is quite easy, i have a new job :). But now i will give a little bit of a backstory on this location, its hardware and what i am planning on doing with it.

Some time ago we moved from one office to another and with that we where also asked to manage the network for the whole building. This gave us full access and responsibility of the server/networking closets. The building was first build for the government so it had a completely built server room on the ground floor, complete with multiple racks, cooling and a ups. Being an opportunist at some times i thought this was the perfect time to place a server and router here for my own benefit. After asking my boss if this was okay i got the permission to place a server here.

First server

It all started with the idea to make this my first offsite backup location. At this point the only servers i had there wheren't at home was an dedicated server i rented from kimsufi. This was also the start of my 'multi-site homelab' as my 2 other locations followed shortly after this one.

I bought a new server and router for this location:

HP DL360e gen8

  • 2x intel e5-2450l
  • 80gb memory
  • 500gb nvme ssd
  • 2x 60gb ssd
  • 3x 600gb 15k sas
  • 4x 3tb sata

Cisco 1921

  • HWIC-4ESW
  • Dedicated public ip address


The design was really simple, a simple router with route-based vpn and a single server. On the server i ran ESXI and only a couple of VMs:

  • Read only domain controller
  • Backup server
  • Freenas
  • EVE-NG

It was setup as an remote location that was primarily meant for creating backups of the whole network. I later added the EVE-NG server because i had resources to spare which i did not have on the other locations. Because of low internet speeds, low available bandwidth and personal reasons i never fully made use of the hardware and plans i had. The backup only ran for really essential VMs but not for anything i was running at home, the freenas backup/replication also never got finished. About a year after placing this hardware i added an extra server because i want to test gamestreaming. This server was also used a little bit to much during work :).

Second server

The second server was added with the sole purpose of hosting game servers and playing around with gpu offloading. Therefore the server had a different CPU with a higher coreclock and 2 GPU's.

Dell PowerEdge R720

  • 2x intel e5-2640
  • 96gb memory
  • 500gbe nvme ssd
  • 60gb ssd
  • 300gb 10k sas
  • MSI gtx 1060
  • Nvidia grid K2

I had created a single Windows 10 VM that got complete control of the 1060 and had 300gb of nvme storage for games only. This worked perfectly and i could even stream certain games up to 1440p@60hz over the vpn to my tv at home. Some time later i added the Grid card to play around with the shared vgpu technology that VMWare uses. The plan was to create a couple of VMs that could stream 720p games to my phone, psvita and simple multiplayer games on easy workdays. Sadly nvidia gamestream does not work on these cards and i do not like the other opensource software for gamestreaming. The last couple of months the only thing this server has done is mine ethereum on the 1060.

Conclusion

It was the first step out of the traditional 'home'-lab and into gpu offloading. Even though i have not used these server that much over the 2 years it has been here i did learn alot and had alot of fun with the gamestreaming. These servers also hardly cost me anything and i did not pay for the power/space it still was a succes to me. The succes with the GPU testing has lead me to also want to retain some of it for my new build. The new servers for the Datacenter build have 3 pci-e slots of which 1 is still empty. I might look into the low-profile tesla card to add in the future

The hardware that has been used for this location will partly be re-used in the datacenter. The 1060 will be repurposed in my tv gaming pc. The HP might find its way into my 4th location as the offsite backup server it was designed for.