HomeProd: the self-hosted TV, cloud storage, home management dream machine

Rack shot

Thanks to all who have posted their findings, advice, tips..this certainly might be a niche, but I (and even my wife!) would not roll any other way, and I have an immense appreciation for the wiki here and for the advice that others have posted.

My goal with this build has always been set-and-forget reliability. You may scoff at the hardware selection or OS/software choices, but this has worked wonders for me and I hope to help someone else. I have a full time job (as a sysadmin, shockingly) that eats up the vast majority of my time, and DIY home projects that eat up the rest. I want services to run my way, and this is still the way to do it.

I'll absolutely recognize that the hardware is the opposite of humble. My employer buys a good amount of gear and I'm able to negotiate decent pricing on some stuff. I also am a big fan of buying things once, automating maintenance as much as possible and walking away. I used to enjoy experimenting much more, but I've got plenty of that to do at work!

The gear

Make/Model	Details	Purpose
Dell PowerConnect X1052p	48 port 1Gb + 4 port SFP+, with PoE	"Core" network switch. Powers WiFi AP's and cameras, most drops coming from the rest of the house
Juniper ACX2100	Access Router	Provided by Comcast for their Gigabit Pro service. They hand off via one 10Gb SFP+ and one 1Gb copper port
Dell PowerEdge R230	Xeon E3-1260Lv5, 16GB RAM, 1x120GB Intel DC S3510, Chelsio T520-SO-CR	pfSense (NAT + Snort). Consumes a measly 24W on average!
Dell PowerEdge R730	Dual Xeon E5-2630v3, 128GB RAM, PERC H830, Mellanox ConnectX-3, 8xSamsung PM853T 480GB SSDs	The Workhorse. Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V. ~122W average steady state
Supermicro 3U 16-drive chassis + Supermicro X10SDV-4C+-TP4F-O	Xeon-D 1518, 32GB RAM, 2x120GB Samsung 850 Pro + 16xSeagate NAS 4TB, LSI 9271-8i	Storage server. Hardware RAID 6, Windows Server 2012 R2

The remainder of the rack is power or whole-home audio, so I figured it wouldn't be as relevant or interesting to r/homelab.

The software

I self-host Active Directory, MariaDB, Plex, Owncloud, nZEDb, Ubiquiti UniFi, and Deluge in "Production". All of these services (minus AD, of course) run on CentOS 7. I reserve some "test" space for occasional projects, but nothing at the moment is in flight. The R230 boots when plugged in and establishes a connection to Azure through VPN tunnel if I need to recover the rest of the gear (via IPMI in a post-power outage situation).

Monitoring

LibreNMS for pretty graphs, Nagios for overall health, PlexPy for Plex specifically. Grafana is definitely next, as I am starting to use it at work as well and just love it.

Closet

I have my equipment in a finished basement, which was a blank canvas of framing when we bought the house. Everything resides in an under-the-stairs closet, with room enough for a 24U, open frame, 4-post rack.

• To deal with heat in such a small space, I use a dual 120mm fan cabinet cooler (AC Infinity AIRTITAN-S7) to draw more ambient air in. This is set low and in front of the rack, with a 10x4" vent cover on the outside of the closet, so it looks like an air return (which, it is).

• To exhaust air out, it's a Broan 503 fan: http://www.broan.com/products/product/db806e20-b227-4889-84ce-fa06bd3f8d73 This is vented directly outside via an insulated duct to eliminate noise, much like a bath fan. Now, these fans are super loud. Broan sells a variable speed control that is set to about 25%, keeping the thing relatively silent.

• The closet walls are surrounded by 1/8" mass loaded vinyl. Yup, these are just really heavy vinyl sheets that you staple to the studs before the drywall goes up. Unless you put your ear directly to the cabinet cooler vent, you can't hear the gear inside with the door closed.

• Inlet and outlet fans are temperature controlled: inlet based on the closet's ambient temp; outlet based on the temperature at the rear of the rack. The cabinet cooler came with all of this as part of the package; for the Broan fan, I used a line voltage thermostat. So, the circuit is wired: line -> thermostat -> speed control -> load (fan).

• The door is solid core and has an ATS Acoustics 24x48x2 panel bolted to the back of it. The rear of the closet has pyramid acoustic foam glued to the wall to break up the echo and vibration. If you weren't already saying "this shit is overkill", here's where I'd stop.

Net result: measured rather unscientifically by an Android app, 25dB immediately outside the closet, 65dB inside.

Anyway, that's the tour. If you're wondering whether a homelab is a good investment, I've been running some sort of server in my home since 1999. It's an incredible way to learn and moreover helps you immensely whether you're studying to get a certification or getting ready for an interview. Just be careful offering this stuff up to your spouse, friends and family: you'll end up running it for real!

Few more photos:

• Cable porn coming into closet (before walls were up)
• Entry into closet and heading to patch panel
• cabling for audio and home theater (pardon the dust!)
• exterior of the closet today I did vast majority of my own work - if you have questions on your build I'm happy to give it a shot!