I decided to redesign my home lab to focus on virtualization, containers, automation, and infrastructure monitoring. The main goal of this project was to build a more flexible environment for learning modern IT technologies while preparing for future high availability and clustered services.
Dell R210 II x2
Servers became the core of the new infrastructure. Both servers were upgraded with RAM, SSD (OS) and HDD storage for virtual workloads
Proxmox VE was deployed as a cluster, creating the foundation for future high availability. At this stage, the environment was not yet configured for HA because a minimum of three servers is required. The long-term plan was to add a third node and build a Proxmox HA cluster with Ceph distributed storage.
Due to the hardware specifications, Linux LXC containers became the preferred solution for running services, while selected Windows virtual machines were planned for future deployment.
HP Microserver G7 N54L
The server from the 2018 project was completely redesigned and repurposed as a Debian Linux NAS. The storage configuration included:
- RAID1 with two SSD drives for the operating system and LVM management
- RAID6 with four 1TB hard drives for data storage, providing protection against the failure of up to two disks
- Cisco ASA 5510 Firewall (upgraded with a Cisco 4GE SSM Gigabit/SFP module)
- Cisco Catalyst 2960G
- TP-Link TL-WR841N (running OpenWrt as a wireless access point)
- Hikvision CCTV recorder
- Lenovo S400 laptop (used as a dedicated Zabbix monitoring server)
- New 8U rack cabinet
- Cat5e patch panel and PDU
- Proxmox Virtual Environment
- Infrastructure monitoring with Zabbix
- Ansible automation
