Building a Micro DataCenter at Home

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

• Deluged Torrent Client with a WebUI
• Plex Media Server
• TimeMachine Server

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