It’s been a while since the last update, my lab went through quite significant changes in the hardware department while the software mostly stayed the same. This year I finally managed to rack everything, making the whole setup look neat and compact.

New hardware for the main hypervisor

This is something I put together last year mainly to reduce power consumption by a significant margin. The old Intel Xeon E5-2650 has now been delegated to lab duty, being replaced with a (when bought) shiny new AMD Ryzen 5600X with a complimentary 128GB of DDR4 RAM. Motherboard is an ASRock X470D4U with a Noctua NH-L12S cooler rounding of the package. Once the old Seagate SATA SSDs start to wear out I am going to finally replace them with NVME SSDs. Otherwise I am still running Proxmox on it, nothings changed there.

Making the network smarter

As eluded to in my previous state of the lab I replaced both of my old Zyxel switches with a single TP-Link T2600G-28TS L2 managed switch, allowing me to make heavy use of VLANs. Not much else to say, its been a reliable piece of kit doing its job unnoticed.

UPS

In 2023 I finally splurged on a brand new rackmount UPS, a APC SMT750 to be more specific, bringing me closer to finally be able to contain all my gear inside the rack. Along with it I purchased a management card, allowing me to control every outlet of the UPS and neatly powering on and off the lab part whenever I need to. It´s not actually mounted using the included, which are why too long for my short-depth rack, so I 3d-printed multiple standoffs to rest the unit at the roughly correct height. Kinda janky but good enough for me.

Bits and bobs

Still using the Unifi AC Lite for wifi, currently looking into a replacement for it. In other news, my old Anet A8 3d printer destroyed itself by blowing its fuse so badly it physically can not be removed. So I got myself an Ender 3v2 back in 2021. While its pretty ancient and slow compared to newer printer it still does its job and I am going to keep it until breaks.