You are not alone my friend. I used to also have a 42U cabinet in my garage for several years. It housed a bunch of servers, mostly Dell poweredge but also som

You are not alone my friend. I used to also have a 42U cabinet in my garage for several years. It housed a bunch of servers, mostly Dell poweredge but also some no-name boxes, plus some switches and other miscellaneous gear. The power draw was too strong for my poorly garage circuit and after any power outage I had to power up the rack one device at a time - it was a massive pain. I also spent WAY too much time tinkering with it all, instead of actually using it in anger. Sure, it help me immensely doing PoCs for work or for my own learning, but it was always overkill. Funnily enough though, every other tech-head that saw it was envious, until I started detailing the horror stories of keeping it all running. Thankfully Virtualisation became a usable and affordable platform for tinkerers, and I migrated everything (via a streamlined custom P2V process) to ESX, then later on migrated/rebuilt the VMs over to Hyper-V. I now just run 2x Tower servers (HP 8xxx series workstations - dual Xeon based) and run 20+ VMs on each. Plus a single NAS for file storage. Life is so much easier... and the Garage is so much quieter.