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:
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….)
I ordered special patchpanels with RJ-45 ports on each side:
Datacenter I:
That was my main datacenter before the re-design:
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:
The second rack (black) is moved directly to rack1 (grey):
Making progress….
After placing all servers and all other stuff again inside the racks, it was time to finalize the cold air area:
Final stage:
Actual look of my main datacenter (with sliding door to cold area opened)
Datacenter II:
After finishing datacenter I it was time to do nearly the same inside datacenter II:
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