Building a Micro DataCenter at Home

Ashok Raja
3 min readMar 28, 2021

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Creating a mini Data Center at home has been my long term dream. Since my ISP gave me a static IP very cheap and finally was able to spend some $$$ to afford it and most importantly got some time to set it up.

Architecture

Hardware

1 x emini NUC Mini PC — Metal01
Compute : i7 8th Gen 8750H (6 Core), 9M Cache, 2.2GHz upto 4.1GHz Turbo
Memory : 32GB RAM
Storage : 1 TB HDD, 1TB Software RAID1 (2
x SSD USB3), 2 x 5TB usb HDD, 1 x 2TB usb HDD

1 x emini NUC Mini PC — Metal02
Compute : i7 8th Gen 8750H (6 Core), 9M Cache, 2.2GHz upto 4.1GHz Turbo
Memory : 32GB RAM
Storage : 1 TB HDD, 1TB Software RAID1 (2
x SSD USB3)

1 x Raspberry Pi 4 — Atom
Compute : Quad core Cortex-A72 (ARM v8) 64-bit SoC @ 1.5GHz
Memory : 4GB RAM
Storage : 32GB MicroSD, 1
x 5TB Segate Portable HDD, 1 x 4TB Segate Portale HDD

1 x Apple Mac Mini — Main PC
Compute :
6-core Intel Core i7, 12MB shared L3 cache, 3.2GHz upto 4.6GHz Turbo
Memory : 32GB RAM
Storage : 1 TB SSD, 1
x 2TB NVMe SSD
Keyboard :
Keychron K2
Mouse :
Logitech MX Master 3

Network : 1 x 8 Port Gigabit Switch
Router : 1 x Asus 5ghz Gigabit Router

Infra Setup

Router, Switch and Raspberry Pi 4

Metal01 & Metal02

Main PC, Monitor & GPU

Alright What I use it for ??

I use this for various purpose. Learning, Experimenting new technology & POCs, Media storage & Streaming 4K videos to Android and Apple TV, Backups etc..

Metal01 — Core VMs

  • cmdcenter — a bastion server, Haproxy server to expose some internal service like (VS Code Server, Proxmox KVM UI, Firefly III UI etc)
  • Core K8 Cluster — Running Firefly III (Personal Finance Manager)
  • Windows 10 — Once in a while need this for some odd reasons
  • NAS Server VM — All the storage is connected to this VM and shared via Samba, NFS, AFP.

Metal02 — Other VMs

  • Experimental K8 Cluster
  • clitools — Multiuser env with all the cloud cli tools installed
  • Few other POC VMs

Atom

Main PC

This is my main computer I use daily for all things(Writing Code, Mail, Teams, Slack, Browsing, Editing Pictures I shoot, Writing this Blog etc)

  • VS Code Server (Web IDE based on Microsoft VS Code)
  • Docker
  • All the IDEs Installed
  • All developer tools and languages Installed
  • All messaging and meeting applications
  • Various browsers. Though Safari and Vivaldi are my browser of choice.
  • Lightroom CC, Photoshop CC

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Ashok Raja

I’m a Computer Engineer by profession and a Traveler by heart. I love all things Computers, Travelling, Trekking and Biking.