Hi everyone, Long time lurker, first time posting... Year ago I built a home virtualisation server as a router, file & plex server and it has been running since. As you can see, it's a mess of pre-owned parts, and some cheap components of local substitute for ebay. It was meant to be an experiment, to be replaced by a real server like Dell R720 or HP DL380, but it turned out to work flawlessly so I decided to build it a new case. Current case is a stripped HP DC7600 with HP Z400 motherboard, six core Xeon, two LSI SAS controllers and three 1Gbit Ethernet cards. Eight 3,5" drives are obiously too much for that ancient tower. It's running ESXi 7.6 U3 with PfSense, Freenas and MacOS virtual machines, all with hardware pass-through (ethernet, SAS, graphics). Since I live in an appartment, with limited resources, the case I designed is in concert with my abilities. Frame of wooden rods 10x10mm, with plywood and plexiglass panels. Plexi panels will be laser-cut by local firm, while I'm building the frame. Hopefully, everything will fit in the end. For introduction, here are some screenshots of CAD model...
Thanks for the vote of confidence. So, I started fabricating the first part: frame for the main ventilators. I still have a problem finding a PMW fan controller that can handle three of those server fans: 12V, 4.6A. I don't dare attach them to the motherboard headers.
Final configuration will be based on 12 x 3,5" HDDs (for now 1TB each, later to be upgraded to 4TB) in two VDEVs of RAIDZ2, with L2ARC and SLOG on 120GB SATA SSDs. That leaves 2 SATA/SAS connectors (one per SAS controller) for possible hot spare or external connection (laptop ZFS drive?). For ESXI datastore 2 x 960 GB SSDs will be connected to motherboard SATA ports. The whole contraption will be connected with 6 x 1Gbit ethernet (later to be upgraded to 2 x 10Gbit + 2 x 1Gbit for WAN connection).
