One of my custom built XCP-ng virtualization servers is finally in my rack, connected and working. I will soon have my hallway space mostly back which is where they have been running serving up my virtual environment for the past few months. The primary issue has been locating racks, rails and hardware and piecing them together.
I also had to go pickup a mounting bracket for my 2.5” boot drive to mount into my 5.25” bay. I was going to use ssd’s and had purchased hot swap bays for the boot drives but one of my ssd’s died so I went with mechanical 2.5” drives I had lying around that used to be inside C7000 blade servers. They will not get hammered since they are just the boot drives.
I ended up using a really old rack and rail system to rack my systems. I have had these rack and rails for well over 25 plus years now and cannot recall where I got them. They are plain straight forward and unlike any I have ever seen in the enterprise world but they work well for me with 2u and up rack mount cases. I am using 4u cases in this iteration of virtualization servers.
Not all the holes lined up and I ended up doing something I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do again which is drilling additional holes in the rail portion that connects to the case. This wasn’t bad considering in the past I have had to drill in cases to put things like support studs for motherboards and bolts and screws to act like rivets to connect rail kits. I have even did some specialized work for airflow baffles in the past.
Anyway I have the template needed for the other case to get racked and will hopefully get to do that tomorrow after moving all the VMs to the system in the rack currently. I need to make the system in the rack the master server in XCP-ng before moving the VMs over.
