Your own home server rack?

Question

Iron

Good day, friends!
I would like to ask the wise and omniscient for advice on the following problem:
There was a whim to build / buy home your own server rack, small, somewhere in the height of 10-16 units, where, respectively, to install one-two-three-infinite piece of iron for study /experiments.
The difficulty is that I am not yet a hardware and administration guru, which is why, in fact, I got excited about building a sandbox test site at home to organize my own architecture.
This entire zoo is supposed to be used in approximately the following way: various vps containers will be created for various needs with their own limits, in particular, APP containers, containers with databases, containers with other goodies (like a gabber, a search engine or something else), and others others.
Accordingly, a question consisting of two:
1) What would you advise me to not expensive entry-level pieces of iron, moderately “strong”, so that you can play with them and so that various web projects take off on them using modern technologies, but at the same time the time is not for top levels, so as not to overpay for a bunch of different technologies that will not be needed at all when organizing web applications?
2) What way to create ready-made custom containers of various levels (for example, an APP container with Apache and PHP, and a container with a PostgreSql database) can you advise?
Thanks in advance for any replies! Good Friday everyone :)

Answer 1

Server rack at home?! And how will you sleep, she will buzz like a medium-sized plane.
Dedicated is our everything, and it will be cheaper, taking into account the depreciation of equipment. To play just right.

Answer 2

the cheapest option for home habrahabr.ru/post/81603/ =)

Answer 3

We buy these things for small offices:
www.maltima.ru/catalog/outdoor_cabinets/soundproof_telecommunications_closet_sjb_silent/
And a quiet closet and a great table

Answer 4

First of all, all unit servers will make AMAZING noise.
Secondly - are you ready to give hundreds of bucks ONLY for light?
Thirdly - In addition to servers, you will need at least a router and a switch, not counting storage.
If you want something simple and cheap enough - take a powerful desktop on the Coire i5-7, a motherboard that can 16-32 gigabytes of memory, a 256 gigabyte SSD for operating systems, a raid adapter-type controller for a couple of 2 TB screws, SATA is better than SAS (SAS bad for the price and not needed at home)
set VMWare ESXi as the OS - for management you need to have another computer under Windows - ESXi VSphere only works under Windows, or if 5.1 then the option of managing via the web from another PC, but I still don’t tested, nowhere.
Or, for example, Hyper-V Server 2012 - a stripped-down 2012 server with the hyper-v role and most likely with the ability to work with virtual machines directly in the console.
Benefits -
0. Huge savings in light and noise levels.
1. You are unlikely to need to keep and make highly loaded projects and perform their load testing
2. With your 16-32 gigabytes of memory, you can create offhand 16-32 virtual machines per gigabyte of memory, or even less.
3. A separation of infrastructures is created between them using virtual switches,
let 's say
you create one virtual machine with Linux with several interfaces.
By the number of these interfaces in the hypervisor, you create virtual switches, without being tied to the real network interfaces of the server.
In these same virtual switches, you cram virtual machines - production, demo, tests, and combine them only at the level of the first virtual machine - the router.

Answer 5

At home there are 3 servers + PSU 800W
1.Hp DL380 G4 WIN2008 Server 1C + MSSQL is spinning on it
2.Intel D510MO CentOS7+OpenVZ Web server
is spinning 3.Etegro RS 110 CentOS7+Proxy+VPN+Hotspot+Radius
4.Two Mikrotika for different needs
Everything is connected to a Crown 800w power supply, the light burns from 100 to 150kW per month, while all the electrical appliances at home work. If you take a normal hosting or a rack for 30t. access to servers. For 2 years there were no problems, everything was in the pantry at home, but right now I’m waiting for the cabinet to arrive, and it looks like this (it was before)
Now it began to look more cultured

Answer 6

And why is everyone still convinced that unit servers are noisy, hot, and consume a lot of electricity? Servers are now even made on atoms, and some e-3 cheon will eat no more than Core i3. Again, no one bothers to take desktop hardware in a rack case - you can even buy this, let alone assemble it yourself.
Further. If you want to feel everything with your hands, then you will still need switches and routers. Both are better to take from Cisco from ebay. If only because the cisco is tons of documentation in different languages, the widest community and still almost the standard on the market.

Answer 7

Ah, that's cool. In winter, an additional heating element ... True, you will have to pay for electricity as much as all the residents of the entrance pay in total :) Maybe you will change your mind?) Experiments can also be tested on virtual machines, including remote ones. What you have listed for personal needs can be put into one computer, it is not necessary to bother with a rack for this. It is unlikely that you alone will generate so much traffic that you will need to distribute the database and web frontend to two separate servers.
IMHO, build one server first, set it up, install the software... And if you don't have enough (which is unlikely), then think about expanding.

Answer 8

2) What way to create ready-made custom containers of various levels (for example, an APP container with Apache and PHP, and a container with a PostgreSql database) can you advise?

code.google.com/p/lxc-loader/wiki/QuickStart

Answer 9

Why are you doing this, really? Rent a dedik not?

Answer 10

The HP Microserver N36/N40/N56 is perfect for your requirements - it is small, quiet, supports 4 disks in the base, but you can plug in a lot more (only inside you can place 8 disks if you wish, and if you connect external baskets via esata ...).
VmWare ESXi is perfectly installed on it, memory up to 16 gigs (in older models), the processor is analogous to Atom, but with virtualization support.
There were articles/reviews about him on Habré, on IXBT there is a fairly large thread with his discussion.

Answer 11

No, well, more than 1 server is fat)))
I have on one Dell SC1425, which I took for Avito for only 1,500 rubles a bunch of fake VKontakte about 7 domains and all are valid. Base on mariaDB. It costs Apache, CentOS 7 axis, software RAID 0. In addition, I also have a torrent downloader, a traffic sniffer in my Wi-Fi, FTP is up. It works quite fast and 20MB of Internet is enough. The router is the most common GPON MGTS-ovsky, ports are forwarded through internal NAT, ip statics. Stands in the hallway on the mezzanine, ventilation is very good. The top cover doesn't even get hot. Coolers are noisy, but not that much. At the other end of the corridor, you can hardly hear.
Before that, everything was organized on the Gygabyte motherboard with Pentium 4, and everything is so open, without a case. Everything worked well too, only the view did not suit, I wanted something more brutal)
I don’t use hosting, it’s already clear for what reason - even cool and paid fakes are banned and I still want full control over the server, right down to power.