Today I finally finished my Ikea Helmer rack project. The goal of the project was to have enough resources to build a full Red Hat Cloud Suite lab. I am in IT now since 1996 and learned that the only way to stay on top of the game is by playing with the technology. I have to say it took quite a lot of dremeling to cut the Ikea Helmer rack into shape so that I could fit motherboards, fans, disks and power supplies etc. The cool thing about the Helmer rack is that it fits a mini itx mother board perfectly and if you add switches on the bottom you have a self contained rack. With two fans blowing air in and one fan blowing air out you also achieve a good air flow.
Here is a list of the components used in my lab:
2 x APC Smart UPS 1500W
9 x Antec Earthwatts 380
27 x Gelid FN-PX08-20 silent 8 PWN 80mm
3 x SuperMicro X10SDV-6C+-TLN4F-O for Red Hat Virtualization Hyper-converged with 64 GB RAM which will host
Satellite 6, Ansible Tower, CloudForms and OpenShift
6 x SuperMicro X10SDV-4C-TLN4F-O for Red Hat OpenStack (3 controller 2 compute 1 ceph) or (3 controller 3 Compute hyper converged)
1 x Asustor 608t (NFS and ISCSI storage)
4 x Juniper ex2200-c (fanless) (virtual chassis)
1 x Netgear XS708E-200nes
15 x SSD in different sizes
1 x Raspberry PI as a DNS and pxe server for the main deployment
In the next few weeks I will start building out the RHCS components and write blog posts on how to deploy the different products via Red Hat Management Suite automatically.