My homelab used to consist of a single PowerEdge R620. It was a workhorse of a machine and handled pretty much anything I threw at it. But, once I moved from a multistory house (with a basement that I loving called “The Datacenter”) to a single story, I had to make a change. While I didn’t mind the noise, if anyone came over I’d have to explain the sound of a “hornet’s nest” coming from the hall closet. (Plus, in that small space the server was becoming increasingly good at converting $$ to heat.)

That essentially left me with three goals: reduce noise, provide better resiliency, and reduce power draw. This lead me down the path to mini-pcs, and so far they are serving me just as well as the PowerEdge did, with less than half of the power consumption and I’d say a quarter of the noise. While I’d prefer to standardize on one model to keep things clean, between my use cases and budget, I ended up with a hodgepodge of devices. I landed on a pair of Dell Optiplex Micro PCs and a pair of Beelink’s.

PVE clustering was easy (and worked great after remembering to convert my corosync config from a two-node cluster to a 3 or greater.) But figuring out how to get things to fit in the rack was a whole other challenge. Rackmounts are available online, but the cost of production and shipping seemed too high for what I was trying to accomplish. Enter: the 3D printing bug.

3D Printing

As a kid, I had a knockoff of the original MakerBot, it all of its laser-cut wooden glory. After it finally died a tragic death, I pretty much gave up on the hobby. Flash forward to today, and things seem so much better, easier, and (key to this project) cheaper. The cost of a Bambu A1 was the same, if not slightly cheaper, than the cost to order rackmounts for these devices. Luckily, some individuals that are a lot more talented than me already had models drawn up for the same devices I have in production, so after a short wait (and lots of refreshing the tracking page) we were off to the races!

Mounting!

A few short prints later, we’ve got a lot cleaner rack setup! So far thermals are all happy and things are humming along. These are currently printed in PLA, which is not the best solution for this, so down the road I plan on redoing these mounts in PETG to give them more longevity.