Hi all!
Today I moved the new (to me) APC Smart-UPS 3000XL (SUA3000RMXL3U) and Dell R510 over to my other lab/rack. Because the house there was originally spec’d with an L6-30R and L5-20R, we needed to have an L5-30R installed in order to accomodate the APC Smart-UPS as it uses the larger twist-lock connector even though it’s 120v. I purchased brand new APC rails to work with the UPS. The house is also equipped with a Generac 22kw auto-transfer, permanent-install generator so now I can utilize that for powering the servers and network gear since the UPS will keep things up during transfer and condition the incoming power.
I also racked my Dell R510 which is going to be my new shared storage platform. I worked with FreeNAS and Nexenta while it was in my primary location in order to determine what path I’d choose. I bought new rails for the R510 and also had a cable management arm laying around. Everything is installed, cabled, configured, and tested! The APC UPS is nice as it was ordered with brand new batteries w/ a 2-year warranty. It appears as though it should support the rack as configured for 40 minutes of run-time. I’ve also cabled my two R710 ESXi hosts to the R510 for 10 GbE networking and am using bridging within FreeBSD to provide a switchless configuration between the three servers. Very cool.
While installing these items I made a video since many people enjoy that – if you have any questions or want to know more about a particular device/item, feel free to ask!
Thanks for watching and don’t forget to comment, like, and subscribe!
I am a Sr. Systems Engineer by profession and am interested in all aspects of technology. I am most interested in virtualization, storage, and enterprise hardware. I am also interested in leveraging public and private cloud technologies such as Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and vRealize Automation/vCloud Director. When not working with technology I enjoy building high performance cars and dabbling with photography. Thanks for checking out my blog! 
February 4, 2017
Hi Jon, great site! I also just bought a Dell R710 3.5″ with Perc/6i controller. I am looking to have pfsense on it in VM as main system firewall for home, run multiple OS for learning purposes and also and important part, storage!
How do you recomment i do this? I was aiming at installing a small SSD as Proxmox Main drive, 146/300GB CHeetah 15K drive for VM hosting and5 2TB drives for storage.
Any ideas? I am new to this machine and VM’s.
Regards
Sean
February 4, 2017
Hey Sean – I am partial to ESXi personally. You can install it on USB (internal on the R710) and get a drive bay back. The PERC 6i will do you fine so long as you don’t need super high I/O and are OK with disks smaller than 2TB. You need to weigh your IOPs vs. capacity to see if you can just get away with all SATA disks. I would forego the SAS drives since 15k are EOL and don’t honestly offer a ton.