I’ve had this lab for a few years. It’s based on some old hardware but it’s rugged and it’s stacked and it’s good to go at a moment’s notice.
The whole thing is housed in a 5U Pelican Hardigg surplus TACLAN case. It still had sand in it when I got it. I had to blow it out before mounting my gear.
(Click the images for a closer look.)
FRONT
The top 2U are a half depth drawer where I keep cables, SFPs, screws, tools, a USB Crash Cart, and assorted things I might need on the road.
The middle U is an HP DL360-G8. It’s got two 12 core 2.0 GHz XEON E5-2697v2s, 284 GB RAM, eight 500 Gb SAS drives, and an HP P421 SAS controller. It has two 460W hot swappable power supplies and is fully loaded with fans.
The bottom 2U are an HP D2600 Smart Array SAS controller with twelve 4 TB drives.
BACK
The top U is a Cisco Catalyst 3750G switch.
The second U is a PDU.
The third U is the back of the DL360
The bottom 2U is the back of the D2600.
CASE
NOTES
I’m running the HP DL360 specific ESXi.
It goes, and it goes. I’ve run 2 dozen virtual machines including AD and Linux servers, an HR server, a RADIUS server, an SSO/MFA server, and a number of network inspection and threat hunting appliances. The engineers at the company I was working for at the time would remote in to my lab because it was more performant and more reliable than the company lab.
It weighs a ton but I can paletize it, load it (using my tractor or a fork lift), and hit the road with about 30 minutes notice.
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If you had to buy just one, a tractor or a forklift, for loading your palletised homelab, which would you go for?
I use my tractor at home and have the venue load it with a forklift when I’m on the rise.
This is pretty light config he has in it. When I was in the Army they would be three times as heavy because of large UPS. We would 2 man carry them
The UPS box was very heavy. The network and storage boxes were lighter. Most of the weight of this one is in the 20 hard drives and the DL360 chassis. This is definitely a 2 man lift.
It’s a pretty sweet rack. I’ve been wanting one since I got out, Idk what to use it for except lols.
I have a 42u rack now… But, if I had three army racks I’m sure I could consolidate…
Any indication on how much the pelican case cost? I’m seeing “request for quote” for the case https://sierracases.com/shop/pelican-hardigg-classic-v-series-5u-rack-mount-case/
I paid USD$160 for it used on Ebay.
Thanks!
I don’t miss lugging those stacks around. But, at the same time I miss the Army lol
I have considered having a mobile lab like this but have never came up with a good use case. What do you run on there that needs to come with you instead of just VPNing back to it?
“Lab” is a misnomer. I was running a lab for an adjacent product but the real grunt of this box was used for real time breach detection and hacker hunting where the box needed to be plugged directly into the network it was analyzing. I was very VERY good at detecting breaches. I met a group of the operators of APT1 and they knew who I was. Heh.
