I'm working on building a small home lab; here's how it's going so far!
Lab in total:
- Mokerlink 2g041g (slightly used)
- TrueNAS machine in a Fractal Node 304
- BK N5105 motherboard
- 2x16HB DDR4 laptop memory
- 4x4GB IronWolf HDD (refurbished)
- Random PSU I found
- GL.iNet Beryl AX
The machine WAS running Proxmox, but I realized I actually wanted a way to store files so I set up a vdev in RAIDZ2. I get about 3.64 TiB which is plenty for the time being. Although I have it running immich and tailscale.
I spoke to some people in my major and it looks like classes I'll be taking will be using Proxmox so I'd like to start getting familiar with the environment. I was going to scoop up a random mini PC with low power usage (if you can't tell, everthing must fit under a dorm bed) and I figured I would try for the giveaway.
@jmaes awesome! It looks like you are off to a great start with your home lab. Keep up the learning and I know the IT field will benefit from your future contributions!
I finally just got my home lab actually in a really nice place that I am beyond happy with for the time being.
First off i have my 6U wall mounted rack in my maintenance room where my ISPs come into the house. I have Dual WANs going to the Unifi UDM Pro. A fiber connection of 300/300 and a broadband of 100/10 that's setup and my backup circuit. Above that i have a cyberpower 300W 1U UPS and my Synology NAS respectively; which is my main NAS for all my data. with a 4x4TB RAID 10 config. Below on the shelf houses my Lite 8 POE switch that powers both my APs for all my houses Wi-Fi along with one of my unifi cameras and a Flex Mini that goes behind a TV in my family room. Next to that is my Philips Hue Hub that controls all the lights I have in the house.
From there I have a 10Gig uplink that goes to my server/AV cabinet. That goes to the Pro Max 24, which also 10Gig uplinks to my USW aggregation switch. On top of cabinet is my Dell Precision 7820 Workstation that has dual Intel Xeon Gold 6130 for a total of 32c/64t along with 160gb ECC Ram and a Radeon Pro W5500. This acts as a remote workstation that i run VMware Workstation on. I have a full virtualized text environment on it for testing before moving things into my ‘Production’ Networks.
Going into the rack, the 1U server on the top is my Proxmox Backup server running an ASrock Rack X570D4I-2T Mini-ITX with a Ryzen 5600x, 32GB ram, and 4x2TB HDD for a RAIDZ2 pool for the backup storage.
Below is the Network switches as I stated above.
Next is my Minisfourm MS-01, the 12900H addition with 64GB RAM, and 3x 1TB NVMe SSDs,
The next 2U server I build is running a business class Asus motherboard with a Ryzen 4600G, 64GB ram, along with 2x1TB SSD and 1x 2TB Seagate Exos drive in the iStar hotswap bays.
Finally, the last 2U server is another Asrock B650D4U Micro-ATX Server Motherboard with a new AMD EPYC 4244P(6c/12t) CPU, 64GB RAM along with 3x1TB SSD and another 2TB HDD Seagate Exos Drive.
My MS-01 and both of the 2U servers all run Proxmox in a Cluster over a Management VLAN all over 10Gig connected to my aggregation switch. Which is running a Ceph cluster with 2x1TB SSD from each host contributing an OSD to the pool offering HA to all my important VMs running in the cluster. Like pihole, plex, docker, some VDI VMs, nextcloud, etc
Each host then also has 2x2.5Gig uplinks going to my Pro Max 24 giving plenty of bandwidth for all my VM uplinks.
The finally thing in my cabinet is a cyberpower PSU at the bottom you can’t see blocked by the plates (its not a rack mount style unit so doesn't look to good :D) to keep things running in case of any power outages/blips.
Additionally too all the hardware, I have 6 different VLANs all running over the network for good segregation of network traffic including an IOT Network, production, management backup for my servers, etc.
It has been about 2 years of work and slowly building this up getting my home lab to what is it and it has been a heck of a journey. I appreciate taking the time to read about my home lab and giving me the ability to show it off a little! 🙂
@levix Super nice setup. Things I like you mentioned, the failover broadband circuits, Ceph storage, and the little fan in the front of the MS-01 😀 That's awesome. Thank you for sharing! What are your plans for the future with it?
@brandon-lee Yeah the random noctua fan was a bandaid solution lol. When the cabinets closed it was not pulling the best air and running a bit hot so I just slapped a spare fan in front of it to try to push some more air through the chassis. It seems to be solid for now. As nice as the MS-01 is I think in the future I am going to replace it with another 2U server like my other two. I really am enjoying getting more IPMI in my home lab for remote managing. Currently I am working on in my test env on getting a InfluxDB going for a grafana dashboard for all my proxmox hosts. I have some more future plans with adding more to my docker instances as well. I have a solid grasp on the hardware/networking so I am trying to learn more on the software side.
@levix great goals and plans for the home lab! Yeah that is the downside to mini PCs to be honest is out of band management. Even though the MS-01 as the Intel remote management capabilities, the tools to manage it are outdated or just plain don't work from my experience. Definitely cool too on the Proxmox dashboard. This is actually pretty easy to do once you get InfluxDB up and running and have the API created on the proxmox side. It's really awesome to see how well you can monitor Proxmox with these open source solutions.
@brandon-lee that part was tripping me up for a bit but I did finally get the dashboard working and the data flowing right. I had completely zero Database experience at all before this so it has been a fun learning challenge to say the least!
How great to see so much diversity of homelab. I'm just starting out. I don't think I'm up to the task of competing, but it's wonderful to see their configurations, in addition to the good ideas that they want to capture.
Router (~6W)
- Opnsense
- Intel J4126, fanless
- 8 GB RAM
- 4x i225-v3 NICs
Main server, Dell Optiplex XE3 (~14W)
- NixOS
- Intel i7-8700
- 32 GB RAM
- 1 TB 2.5in SSD
- 0.5 TB 2.5in SSD
- 2x 1 TB NVMe SSD
- 2.5 GbE A+E M.2 adapter
Backup server, Acer Aspire XC-830-UA91 (~8W)
- NixOS
- Intel J4125
- 16 GB RAM
- 256 GB NVMe SSD
- 14 TB HDD
- 2.5 GbE A+E M.2 adapter
Total power draw is ~40W idle with a UPS. The hardware setup needs some improvement, but I'm happy with the software setup. I'm running about 20 services deployed primarily with podman containers.
@sander nice setup. Also, really curious on NixOS. I haven't seen anyone else post they are running this. I have explored it a little but need to do that more. Definitely love the modular nature of it from what I remember. Cool stuff.