Although it’s quite unpopular nowadays, i still experience some joy while playing around with the real hardware. In year 2020, you can get any infrastructure in minutes from IaaS providers like Amazon Web Services, Digital Ocean or Linode - dozens of them. You just select what you want, fill in your credit card - and voila! You have your VM up and running somewhere in a distant datacenter.
That’s very nice, effective, and you can focus on what matters most to you.
I’m wired a little bit differently. I have a bunch of hardware I’ve collected over the last few years and i use it currently to develop and run some tests and applications.
Servers
I’m currently using 2 servers build on top of Tyan S7012 motherboards. These are a seasoned server motherboards which support dual CPUs (2 CPU sockets per board) and IPMI (allowing complete remote management over network). Each server gives me 24 vCPUs and ordinary amount of RAM and storage.
Additionally, i have a remote NAS built on top of unRaid, which is connected by 1Gb network to the garage. NAS has NFS shares that can be used as remote disks for the VMs, while offering ~100 MBps throughput.
Network
For hooking everything up i have 2 devices - switch and Wi-Fi router. Switch is giving me wirespeed gigabit access between the servers and NAS (it also connects UPS to servers), while the Wi-Fi router adds wireless access on top of that.
Power Distribution
Power for the equipment is backed up by an UPS. I’ve recently bought a used APC Smart-UPS SURT-1000-XL. It sports 4 x 9Ah batteries and is extendable - I can add external battery packs to get more runtime if the power goes down. It can keep running one of my server for 1 hour and 30 minutes - which i think is good enough.
Outcome
All the hardware gives me an ability to quickly spawn a new VM, install an OS, expose it to the Internet and be more or less sure it’s running 24/7.