Lab runneth over

Its seems I update this page yearly, lets see whats happened over the last year.

I upgraded the Networks switching from the old 1G Dell Power connect 48 port I had gotten free to a combination of Mikrotiks, one 24/1G Eth 2/10G SFP+(CSS326-24G-2S+) and a 4/10G SFP+ 1/1G Eth SFP (CRS305-1G-4S+)

With this network upgrade I got both the “Servers” and the “Wireless” on VLans as well as going over the 10G link coming out of the OPNsense router now to the New switches, “Wireless” is split out to the access points.

I was forced off of ESXi at the end of last year with the announcement that ESXi was ending support for version 6.7 in November of 2021, I have just read they actually extended it to October 2022.

The end of support hurt as 7.0 dosent support the hardware ware in my server nor did it support the 10G SFP+ card inside.

To be ahead of the End of Support and to make sure I didn’t get lost in security holes I started seeking out alternatives.

The one I landed on and have been running since roughly October of last year is Proxmox VE, 95% of my Virtual Machines were converted without a problem. The two from memory that did cause an issue were my ansible control Linux system and a Windows 10 box. These were recreated and have been functioning happily.

I decided to forgo the Hardware raid and return to my long lost love, ZFS Originally opting for Raid Z3 until I saw a lot of performance degradation so I dropped it down to Raid Z2 and have been running it like that since.

I also went through a time of testing NVME drives as Log and Cache for the SSD this ended up being more detrimental then helpful, since then I instead have created a NVME mirrored pool that hosts a single VM I use for work.

My server is starting to get aged.. I first bought it in February 10, 2016, even then the Motherboard Z9PA-D8 was 3 years old coming out atleast in February 7, 2013. Which Next year will make then a Decade old.

The CPUs in it are not the best it can handle, currently it has Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2620 v2 @ 2.10GHz and the best I can find for it is Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2 @ 3.00 GHz, This would give me a 900MHz Boost per core (5.4GHz though I know thats not how it works) on top of 4 extra cores, Per cpu as this is a Dual CPU system. Both Processors are Discontinued and came out Q3’13.

On the ram side I upgraded the Ram from 128GB to 256GB not long ago with the switch to Proxmox and ZFS, ZFS likes yummy ram.

Looking over Amazon for a new server, Matching but allowing for expand-ability is roughly five thousand dollars:

Price