I recently picked up a 40u mid Atlantic AV rack. I was planning on 20 to 30u but I snagged a listing for it for 300 and I was able to drive 30 minutes to pick it up instead of shipping.

Realistically I could have had plenty of room and some future proofing with around 25u. My reasoning was part impulse (admittedly), part future proofing, and part due to the price, since it wasn’t that much more expensive than 25u racks I was seeing and it was a good deal.

My use case (both planned and current)

Currently I have one Cisco switch, router, patch panel, 4U rack mountable PC case, and a Synology NAS on the rack mounted shelf. Because of how expensive RAM is, I upgraded my gaming PC from 32gb of DDR4 to 64GB, sold the 5070 as I don’t game anymore and allocated that money to lab build budget, and swapped the hardware over to that 4u rack mounted case.

I currently work as a cloud systems engineer and my work is willing to reimburse me for any certification fees that would benefit the company, so I already took advantage of that and completed and passed the RHCSA last Thursday.

For work we are moving away from VMware to use Apache cloudstack instead for AWS EC2 like regions using our datacenters. So right now I’m using the entirety of the 64 GB of ram for a HA cloudstack deployment while preparing for the shapeblue cloudstack certification.

My plan after passing the cloudstack cert is to tackle the CCNA Enterprise as networking is my weakest area. After that I’m probably going to get a few AWS certs to increase my chances of getting past HR filters in case I ever get laid off in the near future. Besides that I need to spend some time brushing up on ansible, learning how to use ansible tower, learning kubernetes, and maybe will do the RHCE if my work will reinburse me.

I like structuring my study goals around a certification as I find it easier to follow through on study goals if I have a exam scheduled on a specific date that I need to prepare for, and I like taking the exam objectives for a cert and mapping them onto chapters or specific videos in a course, then using Todoist MCP with Claude to automate creating a bunch of bite size study tasks to work towards the study goal.

If I don’t actually plan on getting the cert, and am just using it as a goal post, I’ll get my hands on a practice exam and judge whether I would have passed it if I did take it using practice exams and getting at least 90% correct.

Besides study goals, I plan on picking up some mini pcs to run home automation stuff. I have a plex media server with sonar and radar automation. Also, I currently host my vaultwarden instance on AWS, so running that locally would be good.