HomeLab Stage LI: Datacenter Resizing

My last post was about my 100GbE implemetation, this one is even more on the physical side. I decided to re-arrange my entire datacenter I. Both 42U racks have been moved to better arrange all the cables and interconnections.

This was the planning phase:

Visio planning for the rack design

Equipment:

I ordered coloured patch cables for the different services:

Orange: Power (APC, PDUs…)

Yellow: IPMI (Servers, Storage….)

Blue: Uplinks (Wifi Access Points, Switches….)

Red: Internet (Cable, ADSL, LTE, DMZ….)

Black: KVM (Console to server….)

Grey: ESXi (LACP, HA….)

Wire marking system and short patch cables for the win…..

I ordered special patchpanels with RJ-45 ports on each side:

Delock 19″ Kupplungs-Patchpanel 24 Port Cat.6
That makes cabling and re-cabling very easy

Datacenter I:

That was my main datacenter before the re-design:

Front of both racks are directed to the fresh air ventilation system

I build a wooden wall to seperate the cold and hot air….

I shutdown and powered-off my entire HomeLab (for the first time for several years) to re-design and re-rack it….

The Beginning:

The first rack (grey) was moved nearly 1meter more to the ventilation system and I re-cabled everything:

Network and internet gear re-cabled
Storage environement also re-cabled

The second rack (black) is moved directly to rack1 (grey):

Rack movment done, next step: PDU re-cabling

Both racks are moved and the rear doors are installed

Making progress….

Rack 1 is getting close…..
Front view inside the cold air area

After placing all servers and all other stuff again inside the racks, it was time to finalize the cold air area:

I decided to create a sliding door to separate the cold and hot area

Final stage:

Actual look of my main datacenter (with sliding door to cold area opened)

All systems are re-cabled and fully operational

Front view of datacenter I

Datacenter II:

After finishing datacenter I it was time to do nearly the same inside datacenter II:

Cabling looks much better (I really like the patch panels and the short patch cables)

This was a huge amount of work! I really want it looking great and make troubleshooting easier. Every single cable has its own marking at both ends (Network, Power and Console cables)

What do you think about my re-design?

Stay tuned for the next episodes……

Want more? Check out my next episode: HomeLab Stage LII: Velocloud – Expansion