VCDX #181 Marc Huppert

HomeLab Stage LVIII: Silent Datacenter

In the last episode HomeLab Stage LVII I invested again into my workstation, now it is time to invest into silence of one of my datacenters…..

Two of my three datacenters running at the basement of my house. Both are near my HomeOffice, so I decided to modifiy one of it.

Datacenter I is isolated from a noise perspective from my office through a fire door, which keeps also the sound outside….

But datacenter II is directly attached to my office. There is not so much equipment inside, but you can hear it when working inside the HomeOffice. I wanted to change that….

I am using inside datacenter II an Ubiquiti fanless switch. Each system is connected via 1GbE and the switch uplink is a dual 1GbE SFP to my main datacenter I. This will be upgraded later….

Cooling system from outside of my house, always fresh cool air

My Apple MacMini servers are very silent and not powered on 24/7. I can power them up when needed via network controlled power supply.

The Apple MacPro is also not hearable, when powered on. Except my SuperMicro 1HE servers, which are running 24/7…..

The active fan keeps the system cool, but makes a lot of noise in the 1HE chassis

It is time for a new investment….

New systems: 2 x SuperMicro E302-9D passive cooled, yeah! I really like the SuperMicro systems, they are powerful enough for HomeLabs and they don´t need too much power.

Passive cooled E302-9D

Each system is equipped with:

  • Quad Core 2.2 GHz Intel Xeon-D 2123 CPU
  • 128GB DDR4 RAM
  • 1 x Samsung NVMe 970 Pro 1TB (vSAN Caching)
  • 2 x Samsung 870 EVO 4TB (vSAN Capacity)
  • 6 x 1GbE onBoard NICs (vSAN Witness + VM traffic)
  • 2 x 10GbE onBoard NICs (vSAN Data + vMotion)
  • 1 x 1GbE IPMI with Full SuperMicro license installed
You can see the central heat spreader. Be careful, when opening the case. Don’t cut any wires….

I configured every component with additional cooling, including the memory modules and the NVMe M2 device. Without the Noctual fans, the NVMe device will be forced shutdown….

The Samsung 970 Pro NVMe is placed under the fans (mounted with a heat spreader as well)
It is not much space left inside the server…. The top chassis has additional cooling pads for the memory modules
All ports are on the front side of the E302-9D including the external power supply

This is the entire silent datacenter II rack:

Not on the picture is my Apple MacPro (ESXi) and the UPS system. And yes of course, each system is attached to my KVM HTML5 system 🙂

Mission accomplished! The entire datacenter II is now near zero noise. Stay tuned for the next episodes…..

Check out the next episode: HomeLab Stage LIX: Travel Preparation