Hypervisor Server

In late 2021, Jay bought a Dell R730 with 128GB DDR4 RAM and 2x Intel Xeon E5-2667v3 CPU’s.
He built it initially with Raid 10 across 10x 1TB SSDs however after some time he changed to Raid 6 to allow for more storage with a comfortable amount of redundant storage available.

He has enjoyed having a Hyper-V server to learn the ins and outs of different operating systems and running various servers such as web-servers, mail-servers, gaming-servers and much more!

Custom Built NAS

In 2017, Jay built an Unraid server to handle hisstorage but after some time and countless bugs, he made the jump to TrueNAS in early 2023. And so far, he has not looked back once. Jay runs both SMB and NFS shares from this NAS for use of his media library and to host the data of the backups from the hypervisor server.

Backup Configuration

Jay is an advocate for 3-2-1 backups, so much so, that he wrote an article about it on his blog. In this mindset he backs up all his virtual server data at least daily (some servers are backed up every 3 hours or even hourly depending on the data on them) to the TrueNAS server. He then has TrueNAS replicate its contents to another TrueNAS server he built that Jay keeps at his mother’s house daily.

Home Assistant

Jay has put a lot of time into the home assistant ecosystem over the last year. He has created automations to alert him via the mobile app when the virtual machines are running low on resources (CPU, RAM and Storage).

Jay also has it turn on the central lights to his home when he comes home from work, and then has it turn them off after he leaves the area (as Jay regularly forgets to turn them off!)

Uptime Kuma

Uptime Kuma is a fantastic open-source piece of software that Jay runs from a Raspberry Pi outside of his home. It monitors all of his servers remotely for outages (such as TCP ports, HTTPS + Keyword and ICMP) and alerts him after 5 minutes so that he knows he needs to fix something!

PFSense

Jay was running a MikroTik RB3011 for several years as his firewall appliance however he fancied learning something new that works in a completely different way. Jay had an old Dell T30 laying around, so he installed PFSense onto it and played around with the configuration. After finding it simple to use but offering far more many features than the MikroTik Jay decided to deploy it as my main firewall at home.

Jay plans to migrate onto an official Netgate appliance soon but until then this has served him perfectly!