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As someone who has never done this before, what's the benefit of setting up a server rack, compared with just using my desktop? Is it purely for the fun of tink
by powersnail 5y ago
As someone who has never done this before, what's the benefit of setting up a server rack, compared with just using my desktop? Is it purely for the fun of tinkering with hardware? Is there something that's not doable on a desktop?
- mbreese 5y agoThere isn’t anything that isn’t doable on a sufficiently sized desktop. IMHO a rack is more helpful when you start doing larger cable runs or networking gear that isn’t available as a VM. With a well sized desktop (or pedestal server more likely), you can recreate most homelab setups virtually. You might use less power if you have separate low power devices as opposed to a single (large) server though, so that’s one consideration. Another those is what it is you hope to accomplish. If you want to test gear or hardware that you can’t virtualize, then a rack can be handy. But even things like pulling out hard drives from a running server can be simulated with a VM in some way. But it’s easier to brag about having a rack than a really elaborate VM configuration. Otherwise, as I missing something?
- Macha 5y agoMy primary home server _is_ my old desktop with some extra drives in there. It can be useful to have a bit more stability for something that you want to be generally up and change less than your workstation setup, and that drives the need for the extra setup. Then I've got a pi for some low load services that I'd rather not be on the same host as anything internet accessible in case of a security vulnerability (things are containerised, but container escape exploits still feel like they come up relatively frequently). The only thing I feel I'm missing over over a real server would be an IPMI so I can boot it remotely in the event of a power loss. There are solutions to use a rPi for that which I plan to look into... some day.
- Elv13 5y agoA PC is ideal as long as there is only one. Once you start adding machines, it is time to move to a rack. Otherwise you end up with a giant ball of wires. Racks have rails like drawers, so the units are easy to service. Thats not the case with a heap of ATX towers. Also, your "collection" remains self contained and doesn't grow. Past some scale, you start to also make use of other rack mountable accessories like UPSes, PDUs, patch panels and switches. In the past, you had to move pretty early because older consumer machines like Pentium4 could only do so much, so you needed many of them even for a basic setup like a LAMP server or render/compile cluster.