How do I build the next big data center in my garage?
I have some spare space in my garage, I plan to build something like a small set of servers(basically for learning)
How do I go about doing this,
How do I get an internet connection with a small block of IPs (are these normal ISPs and would it cost me a fortune? I am based in UK/Ireland)
Any other tips or references will be super helpful ?
- and no I don't plan to be the next hosting provider, at small scale the electricity is too expensive to be profitable.
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You will have to claim you have a home business and then sign up for a costly business ISP line which allows for blocks of IPs to be assigned to your connection (at least here in the US with most ISPs).
If you are doing this just for your own learning, don't bother with the ISP side of things and just do the stuff on your local network, and forward ports as needed.
Look for local listings (like Craigslist) for old server racks people are trying to get rid of, or you can just get some industrial shelving units if you don't mind doing it in a ghetto fashion.
Cheap dedis are my drug, and I'm too far gone to turn back.
Buy a dedicated link with a number of ips (you should look for a large provider in your city);
Buy UPS;
Buy a mikrotik for you to manage;
Buy a switch with some ports .;
Buy a server (probably a tower);
Buy an air conditioner;
Have 220v power (helps save a little).
On average there you should spend about 2k to 10k USD depending on the server you are going to buy, not to mention that you will spend about 50 USD to 200 USD of energy monthly, even more if it is a dual source server.
Want a tip? if you don't want to throw money in the fire to play, the ideal thing is for you to buy a physical server and co-locate it in some suitable place, it will be much cheaper.
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eBay is your best friend regarding server/network hardware.
Bear in mind that a dual Xeon consumption is around 150-200W and depending on the number of HDDs can be even more. Assuming it is running 24/7 that's 0.2 KWh x 24 hs x 30 days = 144 KWh/month. Using an average residential tariff in UK at £0.14 / KWh x 144 KWh = £20.16 / month.
Regarding an ISP with multiple IPs you would need a business solution. I'm not their customer, but just to give you an example https://www.aa.net.uk/broadband/office1/
I suggest you to start slowly purchasing hardware as you find good offers. Start with your current internet connection and create a separate subnet on your router for your lab. Use this subnet to simulate the IP block allocated from your ISP. If you need to give external access to your servers, map the ports as suggested by @nullroute. Then if you really need the external block of IPs you can get a business ISP.
Sounds like Fun!
Just get a server like a dell r710 and everything else will follow.. Make sure you buy one with a raid controller and Idrac cause that's half the fun.
You might ask your isp if they offer dedicated IP, that way you can buy 2 one for your home network and the other for your server so you wont need to have 2 separate internet connection.
Travel back to 1994 when this could turn into a profitable business.
I'll be blunt with you- we've all thought about this, and many of us have done this. There's a reason why so many of us have marginal/minimal equipment at home these days- and that's because this will all be outdated in a year, and then you lost a place you can park a project you still have a passion for.
As suggested, you can build your own racks (or buy some ghetto metal ones from Home Depot), but the biggest issue will be power delivery; you're going to want a couple 220V drops, and they'll need to be done correctly, which means hiring an electrician.
Good luck convincing the electric company and the cops that you're not growing weed.
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For inspiration, browse some server porn here https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/ and feel inadequate.
Setting up a few servers at home to learn some stuff is a great thing to do, but consider:
Hardware is cheap, you can get older gen servers off ebay for next to nothing, but power costs money. A rack stacked with 1U servers and a few disk arrays looks sexy, but the power draw will kill you. A few NUC or a stack of Pi's make great home servers, will sip power and also save your hearing.
Virtualise everything, you can replicate practically any set up you want with a bit of kit and a lot of VMs. Then, when you've learned something, you can then trash the lot and do it better, again and again.
If you want to host services for other people or need any kind of decent connection, even if just for messing around, do it in a real datacentre somewhere (via colo, renting a server or VPS, whatever).
If you want to learn how to manage your own chunk of IP with real protocols, consider joining DN42 (https://dn42.dev) where you can figure stuff out and screw up in a relatively safe environment, for free.
Check out subreddit /r/homelab
...full of exactly this. As burble says electricity and noise is gonna be an issue
But no don't think you can run multi-IP from home easily. Most ISPs won't sell you more than a 1 fixed IP gigabit with low contention. And those will generally not permit resale
Both are terrible at performance per watt. Don't get me wrong they're great - I've got about 4 raspberries and some other SBC...but not on that particular metric.
Would dockerize where possible - less overhead
Performance doesn't need to be the highest priority for a home server. If you have some specific requirements, then sure, but for a lot of things a small SBC will be plenty.
On the NUC side, I have a pair of i5-8250U servers at home; they each idle at single digit watts, geekbench4 at >15k each and have NVME disks. That's a better bench than an E5-1620 for less than a tenth of the power, their performance per watt is excellent. They are also fanless so I don't need earmuffs to sleep.
The depends on the objective; docker if you want to run a few services, but if you want to feel like you have a datacentre under your desk then full system virtualisation is the way to go. LXD can give the VM experience with container overheads.
If you really want to get the most from the least, there's always LXC/LXD or OpenVZ, but I strongly suggest getting yourself familiar with QEMU/KVM. It's where the entire industry is moving that isn't using Hyper-V.
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This was also appealing to me, until I had to think about cost, noise, heat, etc. Running the numbers I decided to colo a couple servers for 'production' tasks, along with a handful of VMs/cheap dedis at various providers, and then I have my old PC in the storage closet for VMs I want local (NAS, VPN, local backup of remote servers, unifi controller, yada yada).
If you need test kit to learn on, I would just get some cheap off-lease business desktops. I've seen i5/8-16gb boxes on craigslist for $50-80. If I needed to play around with clustering VMs I would just go that route to avoid the heat/noise/insane power bill.
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Do people use Hyper-V? I was under the impression that everyone used VMware unless they were so Microsoft it hurts.
It's all some people know. Hell, a guy I knew setup Asterix in Hyper-V because he just didn't know what else existed other than VirtualBox. I'm not a fan of Windows based shit, but it's there. VMWare is cheaper, but not corporate, that's more SMB.
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And Higher Ed.
420 smoke VMware e'ry day.
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Weird. I've known 1 shop to use Hyper-V, 1 group of Linux loving oddballs using KVM who I work for, and everyone else is VMware. SMB to Enterpise, the market is all VMware.
I live in a Microsoft enclave too, Azure is the biggest cloud provider in the area, so it's not like I live in a Linux/Unix utopia.
Most folks I know are either "roll your own firmware", or booger flinging active directory "try turning it off and on again" drones. It's our little area here that I feel at home. That said, I often build my own firmware, but only minimal personal code/config.
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Straight from 2001..
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ask CC, they have experience with that, they've been running an office in the bathroom
Don't. Go rent a small colo space from an existing data center and spend more time on learning other skills.