At least some joy in this otherwise awful week.
Where were we? Ah, yes. The R710 was almost ready for colocation in my garage, and I still needed to install the two PCI 2xNVME adapters.
So, first, good news: The R710 finally found a home in my new colocation in Milan, Italy. At least one of us has something that can be called home.
The picture shows the final installation of the R710.
Unfortunately, the Dell rails I had did not fit in the new rack, so I had to use a couple that were ... ahem ... borrowed from the colo provider. Apparently, the rack is somehow longer than the usual ones. From what I saw in the other racks, I'm not the only one having that problem.
I installed the two PCI NVME adapters. However, I had second thoughts about L2ARC. From what I've read and my usage, I would not benefit
from an L2ARC, and perhaps it's better to have a good-tuned memory ARC. I also considered using either a write cache or a special (mirrored) device
for ZFS metadata. But given that the spinning disks are mostly for archive/disaster recovery, I don't think I will benefit from them either.
Instead, I installed two 1TB NVMEs in different cards configured as ZFS mirror to hold virtual machines and jails. I believe that's plenty of space for what I need, but I left the two remaining slots to expand that pool or for future use.
I bought a Schuko PDU and a shelf to hold the router and the switch. The former is the only new equipment in the rack. Everything else
is something I previously had in my garage.
The router is the exact copy of the router I have in another location, with 4x2.5G ethernet ports running plain FreeBSD, automated through Ansible, and terminating the VPNs. In future, I would like to
experiment with VXLANs and BGP... and maybe E2VPN, when support on FreeBSD will be available.
It's not much, but it's a start. I need to start somehow, right? I hope to have made my hardware fairy proud.đ§ââď¸
So, what's next?
I have a twin R710 that I'm refurbishing. That will mostly hold virtual machines for community projects and have different disk layouts.
I also plan to buy a decent switch. I want something rack-mountable, managed with at least 16 ports and 2.5G+ speed (with 2x10G)
In future, I also want to build a machine for a private LLM, as I have a specific use case for that,
but that's definitely not happening before next year.
#hardware #colocation #rack #servers #update #freebsd #zfs #l2arc #rewindtheweekplease
