I have my own home server running VMWare vSphere 5, a free barebones hypervisor which is an extremely lightweight interface between multiple virtual machines and the physical hardware. This server acts as my main network device and hosts VMs for my backup fileserver, development webserver and OpenVPN server among others. All publicly-visible services are port-forwarded via my home broadband router.

The server was previously watercooled, however noise was proving an issue with my previous micro-ATX “cube” chassis as the radiator was mounted externally. I have since moved the server to a Coolermaster Sileo chassis and used the stock Intel heatsink provided with the Xeon E3-1230 CPU for cooling.

Hardware

Atlantis was originally based around a quad-core Intel Q9550 with a micro-ATX retail Gigabyte motherboard. This was replaced with server-grade components in December 2011 as I felt that it was time to upgrade after seeing Sandy Bridge prove itself during 2011.

A server-grade Supermicro X9SCA-F motherboard, Intel Xeon E3-1230 CPU and 4GB of 1333MHz ECC DDR3 memory was installed in December 2011 as part of a core hardware refresh – this enables me to install a total of 32GB of RAM, much higher than the 4GB previously possible with my limited micro-ATX board, and also gives the server eight logical CPU cores with the help of Intel’s HyperThreading technology.

Storage is provided by a LSI 9260-4i hardware RAID card, with four Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB hard drives in a RAID5 configuration, giving 2.7TB of usable storage.

More photos of Atlantis can be found on my Gallery.