Preparing for Colocation At The Datacenter

I would like to extend a belated Happy Easter to those who celebrate! I took a day off yesterday to observe the holiday with my family, but encountered a few unexpected adventures, including a near miss with a deer on my way home after some celebratory activities. Despite the excitement, I am grateful to have arrived home safely. Let’s start preparations for Colocation At The Datacenter!

It certainly felt like a typical Monday today as I spent a significant portion of my day bashing automated notification robots back into place. I wanted to get my homelab duties out of the way so I could relax and get to bed early. I figured now would be a good time to start prepping some of my old equipment for colocation (colo) at the datacenter.

What Is A Colocation?

In a colocation facility, companies have the option to house their own servers and networking equipment in racks maintained by the colocation provider. Although I will be sharing a rack with other businesses, I believe it is important to keep some servers offsite for safety purposes – especially since it’s free for me to do so!

What Types Of Hardware Will I Run?

I have decided to locate two physical devices in colo: a Supermicro 840 server (featuring Dual Xeon 5550 processors, 96GB RAM, and x24 3TB HDDs) and a Microtik Routerboard 1100.

The Supermicro 840 will serve as a VMware host for several planned virtual machines, including DC3, DC4, DFS2, VBR-Repo2, and potentially additional servers in the future.

Currently, the server is running ESXI 6.7 as I do not have a compatible spare RAID card for newer versions. I have also explored the possibility of installing Proxmox or XCP-NG on the host, but upon careful consideration, I have decided that when I eventually replace the motherboard, processors, and RAID controller, it would be more convenient to back up and restore my data rather than dealing with VM conversion between platforms.

It makes my skin crawl just saying this. I’ve seen worse. I’ll lock it down with aggressive ACLs in the meantime. What’s the worse that could happen? /s

Meanwhile, the Microtik Routerboard 1100 will act as my primary layer 3 device and uplink my server.

Would that make it a Swouter? I guess so?

In addition, the Routerboard will act as a site to site VPN at the colocation which will establish a secure connection between my Sophos firewall and my Microtik Routerboard. This will allow me to utilize servers on both networks seamlessly, as if everything were local.

Conclusion

Tonight, I got everything powered on, built two RAID 6 pools on the Supermicro, Installed ESXI, and Upgraded the Routerboard to its latest firmware.

Fingers crossed by the the end of this week, all of my hardware will be staged and I will hear back when I can move in.