I’m running WiFi 5 (is that what we’re calling 802.11ac these days?) Omada gear, works pretty well.

I’d recommend making a proper jumper for the 24 pin rather than using a paperclip.

Where’s your bar for “not too noisy”? I have a rack case and the disks are the loudest things in it.

Over the last couple of years I’ve gone from a HP Microserver to a DIY Frankenbox in a Fractal Define to a Supermicro CSE-846. No regrets at all. I can now fit all the disks I could possibly want.

As long as you’re running fail2ban there’s no harm in it. Without exception you should disable root login, and ideally you should disable password login and just use keys.

One fairly common way of doing it all in one machine is to pass a HBA and disks through to a TrueNAS VM.

Depends entirely on what you want to do with it. Mostly storage with some containers and a little light virtualization? TrueNAS Scale. Mostly virtualization with less robust storage features? Proxmox.

Depending on the size and type of disks you have you could manually set the max RAM it’s allowed to allocate for ZFS ARC. My Proxmox box has a RAIDZ1 of three 800gb SSDs, it didn’t need to be scoffing 48gb for ARC.

Put your IoT devices on their own VLAN and don’t let them connect to the internet.

1. I’d mount the switch between patch panels. Or at least next to the one you have.
2. Do you really need a cable organizer?
3. I’d rear mount the PDU

Do horrible things to Larry Ellison and half the world will help you get rid of the body.

R710 is Gulftown era, which is going to be really lacking in both core count (max 6/socket) and single thread performance compared to something a few gens later. I wouldn’t recommend buying anything older than an E5 v3/v4 platform.

Are you absolutely married to the idea of ESXi? Because it sounds like TrueNAS Scale might be a better fit for your use case. Most of your requirements seem to be centred around storage and it can handle backing up to a remote out of the box.

TrueNAS Scale is a good choice. Good storage features plus containers and some basic virtualisation.

In the wall I have a TP-Link Kasa KP115 so I can monitor the power draw of the rack. Then power goes into an APC SUA1500RMI2U which feeds a vertical PDU. My servers and router connect to the UPS using NUT so they can monitor the battery state and shut down when required.

Depends entirely on how you set it up. The 1gb/tb is a broad rule of thumb for running ZFS, if you’re running ZFS you’re probably running with no cache at all. No idea if your software exposes ARC hit stats, if not you can run arcstat.

On the other hand, running hardware raid is practically free because all the parity calculation happens on the RAID controller so you can spec out much lower end hardware (but won’t be protected against bitrot).

Run TrueNAS Scale on bare metal and virtualise or containerise HA on it.

If you don’t like paying for software you should probably avoid Unraid too.

Thanks. I vaguely remembered reading that post before but I couldn’t find it last time I went looking.

I did the dumb. I’m now looking to replace my non-PoE with a PoE to get rid of some injectors (I refuse to have more than one switch in an 18u rack).