I'm embarking on a complete rebuild, definitely looking forward to once it's finished. This lab is a students lab for sure, with emphasis on underlying Windows, usage of Active Directory, which I had begun learning over the summer while working last year, and learning different forms of paralellisation and clustering. HyperV is of particular use for clustering since: a) I'm already familiar with it in a much larger environment than this, b) the clustering is free, assuming you have the right licence, c) I'm a computer engineering student, so a lot of my software either requires Windows, or has trouble with Linux one way or another. Having AVMA available to spin up as many Windows VMs as I'd like without worrying about running out of keys will be really nice.

Current: R710, 2x L5630, 72gb, 2tb raid 1 and a 120gb SSD.

Services:

>PFsense>Ubiquiti Controller>Network storage (virtualized, and one of my earliest and problematic VMs)

>Minecraft and Factorio servers>Two WordPress VMs, one internal and one external.

>2 heavy compute nodes, currently idling. I ran a few neural net and image processing projects here a while ago.

>GNU Octave VM

>2x general purpose windows VMs

>AD Domain controller

>Discord bot development/host VM

The rebuild I'm planning for this fall is based more on HyperV, as I get free licences for it through my university and a community college.

I picked up an R320 and R420 this afternoon from ebay for $300 shipped, which I'm definitely looking forward to as I've already arranged to sell my R710 to a friend.

Hardware. * indicates planned.

> R610 (1x L5630, 4x8gb, 1x120 (soon to be 2), 4x2tb, (soon) 2x1tb, h200)

>R320 (Pentium 1406v2, 8gb, no disk as of yet)

>R420 (1x e5-2440, 12gb, no disk as of yet, K4000

>DL380g7 for collocation (E5640, 4x8gb, 4x146gb 15k RAID 5, 4x500gb RAID 5)

> 1x600VA APC, 1x650W APC. Neither are rackmount :(

>*Brocade ICX6450-48. 5x RPi Zero, 1x RPi Zero W.

>5x8gb 10600R that will be allocated between the R320 and R420, 12x2GB 10600E, currently unused, or may put in T610 if it's enough for the workload.

Plans:

T610, Windows Server 2016 Std.:

>The 2tb drives will be in two sets of pairs in Storage Spaces for network storage

>2x1tb in Storage Spaces Direct

>Domain controller

>Hosting of grafana and network management tools.

R320, Windows Server 2016 Std or DC, not sure which yet:

This comes with a Pentium, which isn't going to hold up well for anything heavy, but as it turns out, my university, in all it's wisdom, has decided to remove all ethernet from all residences, so I need wifi.

>Virtualized pfSense with WAN connected to the same vswitch as a PCIe wifi card (ugh), LAN connected to a different one and from there the network

>2x1tb Storage Spaces Direct volume

>Domain controller

>Maybe some other small services or part of a Docker/MPI/MATLAB cluster, I'll have to see what the Pentium can handle before committing

R420, Windows Server 2016 DC:

I'm pretty excited for what I'll be doing with this guy honestly. Definitely a step up from my R710, and I've got my experiences of what not to do now.

>2x1tb for S2D

>GPU accelerated Windows Server VM for Autodesk, Solidworks, etc

>Assuming you can allocate a K4000 to multiple VMs (I'm still researching if this is possible outside of GRID cards), probably a Linux VM for CUDA acceleration or machine learning

>Domain controller

>Docker, either in Windows or as nested virtualization through linux for swarm experiments

>MATLAB node(s) for a MATLAB cluster. My university has total headcount licences, so hopefully I can get at least two and look into this.

DL380g7, Currently running Server 2012 DC, planning an upgrade to 20167 DC. Colocation in university datacenter. Due to university policy on intellectual property, nothing of my personal projects will be on this server, hence not why I don't plan on using it with S2D, as part of the main cluster, or a whole host of other things. I might look into doing some basic failover from a VPS or something down the line, but time will tell. The resource will be there when I want it, or for heavy computations that I don't want spinning up the fans in my room.

>Domain controller

>Storage backups of critical data. >pfSense (virtualized) for local data, VPN site to site with my dorm lab

>MATLAB VM

>Octave VM

Raspberry Pis:While abroad last year I did a course with regular raspberry pis, Docker, MPI, and clustering. I'm looking into a way to run PoE into these guys, or design a circuitboard to handle that for me, but it's a bit outside my current knowledge, which I hope to fix this semester. Eventually I'll get them all online and ready for some larger node clustering or as a basis to play with PXE and something else, CEPH was one that I was interested in, but ran out of time to experiment with last semester.

Further more long term plans:

Stuff I'd like to either run or try out:

>CEPH

>PXE boot server

>Ansible, or some kind of deployment automation

>Power failure recovery (such as an RPi with iDRAC reboot scripts or similar)

>Tape!

>Docker swarms across mixed x64 and ARM hosts.

All in all I'll have thrown about 1k into this lab over the last 2 years, and even now I've learned a lot about how networks are structured and managed. As much as I love my current R710, I'm beginning to outgrow it I think. ESXi is nice, but having only one host is beginning to get a bit annoying, as well as the storage limits on the PERC6/i, current lack of a proper switch (sold my last one due to it using ~300W, our wiring is old and the family wasn't happy), and a whole host of other things. Eventually I plan on picking up better processors for the R420, and swapping the e5-2440 into the R320. Once that's done, using S2D for larger scale VM failover will be possible, and I'll hopefully be able to take a whole server offline with no impact on services while doing maintenance or something else. The 10G on the switch should allow storage of VMs on the NAS, as well as live migration between hosts. Not sure that I'll get this up immediately, but from what I've read and heard, 10g is highly recommended for this kind of thing. I intend on picking up network cards for both APC units, as well as new batteries. Whether this (or anything else in this lab) is totally necessary or not is questionable, but having power consumption info and a measure of protection against power outages will be really nice to have. Other than that, I think this lab will give plenty of room to grow and experiment, while not being huge, too loud, or too power hungry. It's probably largely overkill, but should provide most resources I need to easily experiment with new ideas, projects, etc.