My Home Network, Lab, and Workstation

The Network

My home network consists of a Unifi Dream Machine Pro, a USW Aggregation for 10GbE, a US-16-PoE Switch for 1GbE and PoE, a Unifi Flex Mini Switch, and a single U6+ Access Point.  The core of the network is in the rack with the UDMP, USW Aggregation, and 16 port switch.  Additionally, there is a 5 port Flex Mini switch for my desk.  All of this is uplinked to Spectrum with a speed of 1000/40 Mbps.

The Lab/Rack

My lab consists of four servers and one NAS consisting of Alioth, Ophelia, Orion, Hyperion, and Calypso, respectively. They are all running on a 1500VA Tripplite UPS.  All servers are connected with 10GbE to the aggregation switch allowing fast transfer speeds between each other.  Their configurations and purposes are as follows:

  • Alioth – A former workstation in an iSTARUSA D-200 2U server chassis featuring an Intel Core i5-7600, 16GB of memory, and an Nvidia GTX 1650 Super graphics card for transcoding.  This server is primarily used for hosting Plex and various Minecraft servers.
  • Ophelia – A Dell R330 with a single Intel Xeon E3-1220 V5 CPU, 64GB of memory, a Samsung 870 QVO 1TB SSD for boot, and a RAIDZ1 array of four 12TB drives.  This is my primary storage server for Plex media with 32TB of usable storage space.
  • Orion – A Dell R710 with 2 Intel Xeon X5550 CPUs, 96 GB of memory, a RAID 5 array with four 72GB 15K SAS drives, and a RAID 5 array with four 1TB 7.2K SAS drives.  This is my virtualization server that currently hosts a multitude of virtual machines and Docker hosts for various tasks including, but not limited to, OpenVPN, Cloudflared, Immich, Liquidsoap, Zabbix, and much more.  Additionally, the server hosts the docker container that runs this very WordPress installation.
  • Hyperion – A Dell R610 with 2 Intel Xeon E5620 CPUs, 96 GB of memory, a RAID 5 array with five 900GB 10K SAS drives, and a RAID 0 array with a single 1TB 7.2K SATA drive for the Windows Server 2019 OS.  The primary purpose of this server is ingest of media for my Plex server, hosting the Arr Suite, qBitTorrent, NZBGet, and Tautulli.
  • Calypso – A QNAP TS-453BE NAS with an Intel Celeron J3455 CPU, 16GB of memory, and a RAID 5 array of four 3TB drives.  This NAS is my primary general use storage for documents, pictures, etc.  It also hosts my Home Assistant installation.
  • Misc – In addition to my servers and NAS, I also have a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B running PiHole and a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB running PiKVM for Alioth.
A layout diagram of the HaliosNet network

The Workstation

My personal workstation is a custom built Full ATX computer with an ASUS ROG Strix-B450-G motherboard, a Ryzen 7 3800X processor, 64GB of 3200Mhz DDR4 memory, an EVGA Nvidia GTX 1080TI graphics card, a 1TB M.2 NVME Samsung 870 EVO Plus SSD, 2TB of solid state storage, and 4TB of mechanical storage.  I have a simplex single mode fiber line run from the rack as well, allowing full 10GbE speed.

The setup also features 4 monitors including 2 Acer SA230 24″ IPS monitors, an Acer CB272 27″ IPS monitor mounted vertically, and an Acer XF243Y 24″ 165Hz IPS monitor.