Here’s the top rack, which terminates all the wall ports around the house. The TP-Link Switch hiding at the top powers my POE to 5V converters for wall mounted tablets (stay tuned for a Home Automation post). Beside the switch are two Ubiquiti AirCams. Continuing the Ubiquiti trend, a 24 port Unifi switch runs the wall ports, which include a two port trunk to my server cupboard, and also a two port trunk down to the “bottom rack” 48 port switch. Below the switch is an empty rack mount case as a blank.
This switch is screwed to the side of the bookshelf I’m using to house all the network gear and a server. I used to have a full 48RU rack, but it was taking up too much room. This switch is a 48 port Unifi switch. It connects everything else – all the network gear, the switch above, a two port trunk to the server cabinet switch (I let STP decide which trunk is active), all the studio gear etc etc. I’m not using the 10G interfaces…. yet. My fileserver does have a x16 PCI-e slot, so it’s definitely possible.
Here’s the top shelf of the bookcase that holds all the network gear. First, a Fortigate 30D that is doing firewalling for my CCTV/Outside and DMZ networks. Directly behind it is a Raspberry Pi Model B that is running EmonCMS for my whole house power monitor, and below it a HappyBubbles Node, for presence detection.
The PoE Injector is for a Mikrotik RB750UP in the shed outside that powers 3 cameras and an AP. The white device below it is a Phillips Hue Bridge. A Sonos bridge sits alongside it, and above is the AP (A Ubiquiti AirGateway) for my LimitlessLED lights that don’t like my main Unifi wireless for some reason…. Above that is my RIPE probe, which lives on the Guest VLAN and sends back all sorts of monitoring data to RIPE.
Beside the RIPE probe is the aforementioned LimitlessLED bridge for the lights in the studio. To it’s right is my Ubiquiti Unifi Security Gateway, which is the primary router for my network. Below it you can see a RB750G3 with a LTE USB stick and a Skinny 4G router beside it, for backup internet should my 1000/500 Fibre go down (this gives me both backhoe through a fibre and ISP core network failure protection).
Lastly, attached upside down to the top of the shelf, 2 Ubiquiti ToughSwitches, which power the rest of the cameras around the house as well as the Unifi AC-LR access point that you can just see behind the switches.
Next shelf down. We have a HP MicroServer N40L with 16GB RAM and 1x500GB HDD (OS – Server 2016), 2x2TB HDD (VM storage) and 2x120GB (SSD cache). Attached to it is a Drobo with 2x 2TB, 2x 3TB and 1x 4TB drives for 8.9TB usable. Sitting on top of it is my phone, whoops. Connected via USB to the MicroServer are also a Label printer and the USB->DMX interface for the studio lights. The MicroServer hosts a few VMs inside Hyper-V including my secondary domain controller.
Everything on these shelves are powered either by this UPS (batteries below) or one of two 12V UPSes (batteries also below). I get about 2 hours on the APC UPS and 12 hours on the 12V UPSes.
Batteries for the APC (franken)UPS. 6 banks of 9AH @ 24V for 54Ah of battery capacity.
Batteries for the 12V UPSes. Each has 3x 9Ah @ 12V for 27Ah of battery capacity.
This is the top shelf of the “Server cupboard” which lives in the lounge because it’s too noisy to be in the studio. This is a custom build with a AMD GX-8350 processor and 32GB of RAM. It has a Dell Perc/6 RAID controller with 2x1TB in RAID1 and 6x2TB in RAID10 for around 6.5TB of total usable storage. This server runs VMware vSphere 5.5
Up the top is another Unifi AC-LR access point and a one of two fans that only come on when the temperature in the cupboard exceeds 28 degrees. You can also see the 12V LED strip so I can see when I’m working inside the cupboard and the holes to allow hot air to escape.
You can also see hiding in the corner the bridge for my Sensibo.
Moving on down to the bottom shelf. A Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch-24 sits underneath the top shelf providing networking for the cupboard and the lounge. You can just see the temperature monitor relay, along with the IP camera I use to check the temperature without opening the cupboard… Beside that you see the fan that pulls air up into the top section to allow the heat to convect out the top.
This server is also custom built and is a AMD Phenom 2 x4 965 with 32GB RAM and 4x1TB HDD and 2x120GB SSD which go into a VM running Storage Spaces to store my photo library which then gets backed up. The server itself is running VMware vSphere 5.5.
Sitting beside the server is a Synology Diskstation with 2x 1TB disks which provide a NFS datastore to the two VMware hosts.
The server cupboard (Servers and Switch) is powered by an Eaton UPS with 9Ah of battery capacity (need to improve that) along with another 12V UPS with 27Ah of battery capacity which runs the ONT for my Fibre connection and the fans/lights.
That’s it for now. Coming next in the series will be Software! VMs, Apps etc.
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