[Mashiro]

What do you use them for? And I'm interested to see how this room looks like, can you record a video please xd? Also I asked a friend if a Pi can run Pfsense or not and he said no cus the Pfsense needs two network NICs. What's that small and powerful board you're talking about? Do you mean like ODROID boards or what? About building another machine myself ... not sure but I don't like the idea, a server or a Pi might be better (I think?).

Sorry, I cannot record and upload a video of our server rooms. Only can do a sound recording to represent the level of noise and that it can make you very sick if you stay inside for too long.

It is a mid sized room with two big 19 inch rack cages and a half size 19 inch rack cage. Inside the half size rack there are patch panels and a lot of network switches. The patch panels have very thick and raw CAT 7 cables going to several rooms to provide network connections there for many computers. The big racks are full of the servers I mentioned and also with a few switches (including a few 10 GbE switches) and some routers. Both big racks also have 1 - 2 UPS. One UPS is a very heavy APC (APC Smart-UPS SRT 5000) that requires a very thick power input cable. The other rack has two rather normal Dell UPSs that we try to balance because they don't hold up as long as the APC does.

The servers are used for many things. File servers, print servers, AD & DC, hosting and etc. At the room that I mentioned above we have 6 Hyper-V hypervisors alone! In a different server room we have two ESX hypervisors, storage servers and a backup server that uses 6.5 TB tapes to backup data offline. The backup infrastructure runs purely on a 10 GbE network in its own VLAN.

Anyway.


I've not mentioned any powerful small board (you misunderstood something there). I was talking about small mainboards (mini ITX) that you can use to build yourself a very small but still powerful server.

If you get a Raspberry Pi 4 and buy a USB 3.0 network adapters you can actually do pfSense on it. Thanks to the USB 3.0 ports you can connect 1 GbE USB 3.0 network adapters to the RPi and have several wired network cards inside the board for pfSense. However the RPi is absolutely not suitable for VMs.