One of the biggest pillars of any home-lab is the server environment because it serves as the backbone for your home-lab, I decided to purchase a Dell R710 – over the next few months I installed IDRAC, configured RAID 5 to guarantee redundancy of my data on the host, VMWare ESXI and spun up multiple Windows Server / Linux VMs to host the following service:
- Active Directory domain controller with 1000+ users in various security groups and OUs which were all added via Power Shell.
- DNS + DHCP, IIS Server (Prior to deploying Pi-Hole)
- AD Connect to Azure (Sync on-premise AD users to Azure AD)
Overall, my Dell R710 project taught me a significant amount about traditional racking and stacking and the overall backbone of IT infrastructure – it was my first, enterprise level personal project and I greatly cherish it.
