Probably something compact with a punch. Like a 3-node hci cluster of 1U servers with a terabyte or two of ram and a couple of terabytes of NVMe Storage. Then some networking capable of NVMe speeds and some nice supporting infra like dedicated firewall-, backup- and monitoring appliances. All on a UPS and a generator for emergencies. Also a climate controlled environment to put them in.
oxide rack
A full rack with at least 200GbE, NVMe in everything - probably HCI with at least 8 R660’s in vSAN.
I mean… if money wasn’t a problem- I’d have a loaded blade chassis.
With a pure flash-blade.
I would fill my current 24RU rack like this.
24 - patch panel
23 - 48 port PoE switch with 10GB, maybe even 40/100 gb, with stacking, have a monkey create me custom length cables to each port that I need with the correct colour
22 - 48 port PoE switch with 10GB, maybe even 40/100 gb, with stacking for redunancy for my servers
21 - patch panel
20 - VM Server 1 - As many cores and RAM as can fit into a 1RU Server, 2x 10gb/40/100gb connections to both switches, as many 2.5" 8TB NVMe SSDs as possible
19 - VM Server 2 - As many cores and RAM as can fit into a 1RU Server, 2x 10gb/40/100gb connections to both switches, as many 2.5" 8TB NVMe SSDs as possible
18 - VM Server 3 - As many cores and RAM as can fit into a 1RU Server, 2x 10gb/40/100gb connections to both switches, as many 2.5" 8TB NVMe SSDs as possible
16-17 - Storage Array 1 - 12bay full of 100TB SSDs (ExaDrive EDDCT100/EDDCS100), 2x 10gb/40/100gb connections to both switches
14-15 - Storage array 2 - 12 bay full of 100TB SSDs, 2x 10gb/40/100gb connections to both switches
12-13 - Storage array 3 - 12 bay full of 100TB SSDs, 2x 10gb/40/100gb connections to both switches
1-11 - UPS with external batteries.
I would also have multiple 4G and multi-gig internet connections.
A server with one of those massive epyc bergamo CPUs with like 128 cores and hyper threading. I run a lot of VM’s and for the cost I had to get 4x Xeon 8890 v4 chips. They just use a lot of power and the bergamo would cut down power usage by a decent amount. Along with 22x 4tb SSD drives. For storage. Right now my storage is all over the place. 4x 2tb NVME’s on an asus hyper cars 4x 4tb NVME’s on another asus hyper card 9x 2tb crucial SSD’s in the bays 2x SAS drives for proxmox operating system 4x 8tb drives in an actual NAS although I would love to get rid of this as well.
And an entirely unrelated dell r620 server that I would also like to remove to cut down on power at some point. I am in the process of moving everything over to the dell r930 as we speak.
I’m following this thread more to hear what people would do with unlimited-money setups. Even with limited funds… modern systems are extremely capable: to the point there’s nothing I want to do in a homelab that I can’t already do.
Cloud hosted with a team of devs to make whatever things I want
How many racks would be considered a crazy amount of space?
I think up to 5 is reasonable.
About 4 or 5 mini PCs. I don’t need much, a couple to tinker with and a few to run docker, proxmox etc.
Well, I’d probably start with an NVIDIA HGX H100…
Possible Dave Plumber’s setup he’s shown on his house tour.
e-bgp-4 with a few dark fibers to various IXs
Absolute pipe dream:
A single rack, not even the big fridge sizes ones (I think they’re 48u I’m not sure but I’ve seen them on this sub) but one of the crash cart sized ones (I think it’s 12u). A couple current generation 1u servers, hardware firewall running OPNSense, wired mesh APs and VoIP phones around the house, symmetrical gigabit internet, static IP, GPU server, UPS and a rack mounted console just for aesthetics, a little desk for tinkering. Motorized microscope. (Bear in mind this is “winning the lottery” level wild, just the microscope and GPU server are probably more expensive than an SUV)
Something realistic:
Hardware firewall running OPNSense, 2 APs, mini computer with I9 processor and GPU for virtualization, 300mb Internet, maybe a Jetson Nano and a little IKEA desk for tinkering, static IP. My current microscopes
GPU server
What would you use it for, out of curiosity?
An uncensored LLM, transcoding Linux ISOs and some image processing for the microscope.
Single rack with a three node kubernetes cluster, a massive amount of redundant storage, and several high end GPU nodes for training AI.