Tour the Data Center in My Basement!

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Today's video is going to be a little bit different than some of the other videos I've done recently. We're going to take a closer look at my home lab. So what's a home lab? If you ask ChatGPT, what is a home lab? The response I got was, a home lab typically refers to a setup where individuals create a mini data center or network environment at home for various purposes, such as learning, experimenting, or testing software and hardware configurations. Home labs are used by IT professionals, students, and technology enthusiasts to gain hands-on experience with servers, networking, virtualization, and other tech-related concepts outside of professional environments. So what does that mean for me? Well, I did just that. I set up a data center worth of enterprise equipment in my basement. And what do I do with it? Not much. Let's go take a look at what I got. All right. This is my studio. Here we are in the basement. Going around the corner, washer and dryer, water heater, all the stuff you expect to see in a basement. And then you turn the corner and you see this. That's not something that everybody has in their basement, typically. All right. So pardon the mess because, well, it is a basement after all. We're going to start here at the bottom with my UPS. So this is a 240-volt uninterruptible power supply. It's essentially a battery backup for everything in the rack, and then some if I wanted to. 240-volt. It's about 2,700-watt capacity. It's an APC, what, SMX3000, something or other. This is the battery pack that actually slides in. It's supposed to have a cover on it. It's missing. I don't have it. Whatever. Not a big deal. Moving up from there is a SAN storage area network made by Reduxio. It's a company that's not around anymore. In fact, I think they sold their IP to Amazon or something like that. It's a 36 or 38 terabyte, 38 terabyte raw storage SAN, where this portion is SSDs. The rest of it is spinning this drive, so it's a hybrid SAN, flash SAN. The claim to fame here was the software inside of it, it would be able to essentially recognize like 100 plus terabytes of data within this 38 terabyte footprint. Because the company's now out of business, you can't really do much with the original operating system, the Redux OS, unless you know a guy. Put a short out on this recently. I hacked it. I hacked it. What I did was pulled out the second storage controller and installed TrueNows on the primary controller, then went in and enabled virtualization in the BIOS. So essentially, I could run VMs on this or I could do SMB shares, which was my original intent, was to set this up with SMB shares for all of the VMs in the rack as well as workstations within the network and stuff. But it's really, really heavy in power consumption. This thing pulls like 300 watts at idle. More than that, 350, 400 watts at idle, just sitting there doing nothing. So for now, it's powered off. We'll get back to that. So moving up in the rack, I have four Dell PowerEdge R730 2U servers. Each of these has dual 14-core Xeon processors. Originally came with 256 gigs of DDR4 ECC RAM. Three 300-gig 10K SAS drives in each one, which essentially was the hypervisor was living on those drives. The only one I have powered on right now is the top one. This is running Proxmox, where I've got my Omada controller, a software-defined network controller in a Linux container, an LXC, within Proxmox. I'm running multiple Windows VMs for crypto wallets that I keep powered off until I need to access them. I turn them back on and do what I got to do and then shut them back off. These were originally set up with a server SAN configuration. So these originally had multiple quad port NICs as well as the on-board quad port 1gig NICs. They had fiber channel networking cards built in, or not built in, but added, in addition to the NVIDIA Grid K1 cards, because at one time these were essentially VDI clusters. So virtual desktops for clients to use, which utilized NVIDIA graphics as needed for some of the power users and stuff. So for the host that I beefed up or the one that I'm using, changed out the drive configuration. I've got SSDs. I think I've got 120 gig SSDs in RAID for hypervisor level. Then I've got the 300 gig 10K Sass for essentially OS level. And then for long-term data retention, I've got 7,200 RPM drives, 4 terabyte in RAID as well. Again, I think it is a bit overkill for what I'm using it for currently. We'll come back to that. Moving up in the rack, these are GPU server cases. Each one of these is made to hold eight, up to eight GPUs, long ways, and fit in a traditional server rack. So these were used for crypto mining. They're obviously off right now because they're very, very loud. One of these, actually, I was planning to run vast AI or flux proof of useful work AI services on a server class motherboard. Anyway, that didn't happen or hasn't happened yet. So here it sits. This one's actually empty. I haven't loaded this up yet. This is full of RTX 1660 Supers or TIs. One of these is probably going to stay. The other two are going to go away. We're putting something else in here that we'll talk about a little bit later. So these are all currently for GPU workloads. All right. Moving up in the home lab, we have a 24 port TP-Link layer three switch that's set to a 24 port patch panel right above it. This is for the majority of my wired network. All of the compute VLANs and the mining VLANs run on dedicated port assignments within this 24 port switch. Moving up, we've got a blank. Then we have, I hope you can see this pretty well, a layer three, eight port switch will probably end up being put in a remote location when I get that set up for single pane of glass management of the devices at that location. Right now, it just has an uplink to it. Nothing else is plugged in. Moving up, the tripod I'm using isn't tall enough to get past this cable management tray here. So I'm holding the camera. I apologize if it's making you sick. This is my TP-Link router. I think it's an ER-605, just a small little four port router. The cool thing with this is if I do set up a secondary location and like move a switch over there and an access point and stuff, I can get another router and utilize built-in VPN access from one device to another. Almost like, dare I say, a poor man's SD-WAN setup or software-defined wide area network. Anyway, next to it, I've got an eight port POE switch, which was part of the TP-Link beginners package, whatever they called that. This is just used for my wireless access points, which I only have one of right now. I'll be running one more down here in the basement to get better coverage and then another one out in the garage. Maybe I'll get one of the TP-Link outdoor access points to cover the yard. So when we're out there cooking it up barbecue style over the summer, Wi-Fi won't be a problem. But everything's going to run to that as far as power over Ethernet. Up here, this is a eight port POE switch by Ingenius. They sent this to me to review. Right now, it's just kind of here is a placeholder. This might be set up in the future in a mining location I'm working on. We'll see. And then up there, we've got one of those auto fire off fireball extinguishers. So if a flame touches that, it explodes and puts fire extinguisher material all over all the things. I'd rather ruin my rack than burn down my house. That's why I have this. Got a couple more things to show you, but I got to pull this out first. Why? So we've got 120 volt. I think it's a cyber power. Let's look at it from this way. Oh, that's better. Behind the router and other switch here. So I've got a cyber power, 1500 VA. So it's like 900 watts. 120 volt UPS in the back here. This is powering all the 120 volt things that I've got running in this network rack. Right below it here, Synology DS218. In here, I've got two 10 terabyte drives. This is essentially pulling like 45 watts, a fifth of the power draw of the Reduxio SAN. With the amount of storage that we're using it for, it works great. A couple of 10T drives in there, call it a day. I don't get the benefit of a flash storage in this. For what we're using it for, it's not really needed. Then, of course, the Xfinity modem. So the 42U rack is, I think it's from StarTech. And I got the one with casters on it. And you can see exactly why. So I can pull it out from its little cubby back there, do some cable management or track down wires or anything that I need based on what's going on. So while that's the majority of my home lab, I try to condense it all into one, you know, one rack. There's a lot of things that I tinker with, if you've watched the channel at all, that doesn't fit in a standard size network rack or isn't set up to fit in there yet. I don't know. I got a lot of shit around here. So let's continue down this journey of home lab outside of the network stack. All right. Hopefully holding it handheld won't make you too nauseous, but moving on. This back here is a desktop that I've got set up with a Ryzen 9 CPU, 128 gigs of plain old DDR4, non-ECC, RTX 4070. What do I have in there right now? It's mining. So I think I've just running, I'm not running an M.2. I did have a Samsung Evo 960 Pro in here as the drive when I was using this on proof of useful work, but crypto mining, that's not as important. So I think I've just got an old two and a half inch PNY drive in there somewhere. So that's mining crypto. I think right now I've got it on Pyren being paid out in Radiant using Unminable. This thing is my newest headache, abomination, atrocity, fiasco, project, whatever you want to call it. This is a 4U12G by ASRock, essentially a blade server chassis that holds 12 of these, well, they're essentially blade servers. These are ASRock BC250s, essentially a Sony PlayStation 5 APU, which is a CPU GPU combination, kind of in partnership with AMD. So these are sold to crypto miners, mostly AMD and Sony have these locked down quite a bit where they're kind of difficult to use as like a gaming PC or a gaming node. So I'm wondering how they'll work on AI with machine learning, generative AI, running GPT models, whatever it might be. I'm waiting on some more hardware to come in on these, namely the M.2 SSDs, NVMe SSDs that are going to sit in here, not SATA, and some custom fans that I've got because these things wind up like a server. I mean, they're 80 millimeter fans. Of course, they're going to be fucking loud. Back here, let's see, up here I've got dual A4000 set up on, well, it was on proof of useful work. This is my 6 RTX 3090 crypto mining rig. It's loud, it's hot, and I've got it turned off right now because we couldn't have a conversation back here if it was on. Then I've got my 3D printer farm, which at the moment is turned off because I just got back from a trip. These are going to be consolidated quite a bit this year. 12 printers now that I can turn on and be up and running in no time. I'm probably going to break that down to just nine and get rid of one of these shelves completely. Spare parts back here. Got an ASIC that was going to be a heater for the house, but now it's actually pretty warm. AC Infinity fan that was going to be used to blow heat from the ASIC into the house. Has yet to do anything with. A couple GPUs here. I got another patch panel that I haven't installed yet and some keystone jacks to go in the patch panel. Yeah, and there you have it. That's my home lab as of right now. What, beginning of second quarter, 2024? Middle of second quarter. It's May. So where do I go from here? Because that's a lot of stuff. And as you can see, a lot of it's already powered down and not really in use. Realistically, it's overkill for what I'm doing. Believe me, it's nice to have a data center worth of gear in your basement. Kind of bragging rights, I guess. But in general, like, it's nice to be able to play with it in a sandbox environment, not having to affect production in a customer environment or at the data center. But I don't really do that much. Sometimes. Really, it's for my own knowledge, not, like, for a work thing. So where do I go from here? I mean, I think I'd like to have somebody be able to use this. It's still wonderful, very viable equipment. Somebody get some use out of it. Not just, like, end up in a landfill somewhere, of course. It's totally usable. It's just overkill. So where do I go from here? I've said that three times now, haven't I? Trying to decide, honestly, what I do from here. I can really downsize from a data center rack. Everything on the top of the rack can fit in a network rack. Really, I could move the Omada controller, the software-defined network controller, out of the Linux container and migrate it to this standalone controller device. This would fit anywhere. You know, it doesn't need to be a VM. I happened to make it a VM because I could. You can probably guess I'm going to sell most of this equipment and downsize. When I do, all the mining stuff has got to come out. That's going to get its own dedicated area, I guess. Maybe we'll do some videos on downsizing a data center to a network closet. Got my gears turning on that idea. But let me know if that's something that you are interested in seeing, how to kind of migrate and downsize from the HomeLab footprint I have to one that's a portion of that size, but still fully capable of doing what I need it to do as far as running services in a day-to-day workload. Leave a comment and let me know. If you made it this far in the video and you learned something today, smash that like button. It really helps the channel get recommended to others. And if these are the kind of videos that you like to see, consider subscribing to the channel to see more like it. And of course, thanks for watching.