Since the swap over to my new 4U storage server ZION it has already had a number of upgrades and I have used it quite heavily. My old N5550’s now all sit unused. In this post I will cover the updates to Zion 4U storage server and my Synology NAS 1817+.
Continue reading…
Since my last post about my new Zion 4U storage server I have been more and more impressed by Unraid and have started using Docker and KVM virtualization on it.
Since then I have moved some VMs over to KVM virtualization on Unraid. That left my Domain Controllers, IPAM, and VCSA left on my VMware environment. My secondary DC was also broken so I was running with just a single DC. This made me re-think how the home lab was configured and decided to simplify some of the many moving parts.
The main hassle is recovering from a power outage. Typically I have to manually intervene to get most things back online. Having systems more consolidated will allow a faster and more hands-off recovery.
Continue reading…
I am excited to reveal my latest 2020 custom server build – ZION. See my previous planning post for Zion here.
Built from the ground up to be a custom 15+ drive bay rack-mountable storage server and virtual machine host. Using AMD Ryzen Zen+ architecture and X370 chipset. Zion was designed to be powerful enough to run KVM virtual machines and Docker containers.
Zion runs Unraid Pro with SSD caching and dual parity. It has capacity for 25 drives total: 24 HDDs (16 HBA + 8 On-board Mobo) and 1 x M.2 SSD/NVMe slot.
Named after Zion from the The Matrix movies.
Zion is the last human city on the planet Earth after a cataclysmic nuclear war between mankind and sentient machines, which resulted in artificial lifeforms dominating the world.
https://matrix.fandom.com/wiki/Zion
