You may recall that I started my journey to Elara some time back. I was back and forth between building my own or buying a refurbished one. I ended up doing the latter.

I purchased her at the end of June from ServerMonkey. They’re a really great refurbisher with awesome customer support, good stock, and good pricing. I would highly recommend them.

Elara is the first piece of my plan to overhaul my house’s networking. (More on that in the future.)

Hardware Specs

Elara is a refurbished Dell PowerEdge R640 rack-mountable 1U server. She’s part of the 14th generation of PowerEdge servers.

These are the hardware specs:

• Intel Xeon Gold 6142 Processor (2.6GHz, 16 cores, 22MB cache)
  (Supports up to 2)
• 64GB DDR RDIMM RAM
• PERC H730P RAID controller
• 6 x 1.2TB 10K RPM hard drives
  (Supports up to 8)
• 2 x 1GbE on-board ethernet
• 2 x SPF+ ports
• iDRAC9 Enterprise
• 2 x 750 watt PSUs

Setup

She is running Proxmox VE as the operating system which is an open-source virtualization platform — similar to VMWare.

Right now, I am teaming the two 1GbE NICs — the two ports act as one 2GbE NIC. The two SFP+ ports will be used for OPNsense as a WAN in and switch out supporting the entire network.

All six of the hard drives are in a hardware RAID-5 configuration and is available as a whole to the OS. One of my only regrets is not buying an NVMe drive for the operating system and having the other drives be solely for data storage.

Workload

For now, Elara is the server powering the entire homelab and household. Some of the containers include HomeAssistant, Kubernetes, and Docker.

She’ll be eventually repurposed as the main household server focusing on HomeAssistant, surveillance, home audio, internal networking, and tools we use primarily locally.