Home Lab's what have you got?

BongoHunter · 2 May 2019 at 21:29

BongoHunter said:
I got rid of my older rackmount stuff and now use:

Threadripper 1950x with 64GB of RAM with 2 raid arrays (1 NVME array and then a SATA SSD array) + an extra NVME drive for OS / Apps. I use this mainly for development work and running VMs that used to be on my old servers. There's also a quad port Intel NIC in this machine.

A FreeNas box with 32 GB of RAM (ECC), I've got 4 HDDs in this, and 4 SSDs, this is mainly used for backups and for VM storage, has a quad port Intel NIC for the moment (hoping to upgrade to 10GB network in the future)

An i5 NUC with 16GB RAM that's used for webscraping and other random stuff that needs to run 24/7

An i5 Mac mini with 16GB RAM that runs Jenkins and GitLab

The FreeNAS and NUC are on a UPS

Use TPLink switches in my network.

Hoping to ditch the NUC and MacMini soon and replace with a Xeon E server, and I'm going to add a low power PFSense physical box soon too, but will want an extra UPS before I do that ideally.

Have now ditched the Mac and Nuc and have replaced with a Ryzen 1700, 32GB of ECC and a mixture of SSD and HDD for some weird tiered storage setup that incudes an Intel 900p drive for VMs that benifit from very high disk IO perf

Next on the list is an extra UPS for the new server, and possibly the addition of a few more NVME drives in the threadripper system plus an upgrade to 128gb of RAM in the same box now memory prices have fallen

ChrisD. · 16 May 2019 at 10:53

Threee Supermicro SYS E200-8D's running all flash vSAN with a QNAP NAS as a secondary datastore which is also used for backups.

Greg0986 · 17 May 2019 at 22:15

Dell R510 running Unraid:

2x Intel Xeon X5670
48GB DDR3 1600Mhz ECC
12x 6TB Dell Enterprise 7200RPM SAS (66TB total usable)
HP NC364T Quad NIC

Test1 (HP DL360 G9) running VM's

2x Intel Xeon E5-2690v3
128GB DDR4 2133Mhz
500GB Sata SSD
HP 10Gb SFP+

Test2 (HP DL360p G8) running VM's

2x Intel Xeon E5-2690
384GB DDR3 1333MHz
128GB Sata SSD
HP 10Gb SFP+

Whitebox #1

I7 4790k
Asus Maximus VII Ranger
16GB DDR3 1600MHz
MSI GTX 970 Gaming4
128GB SSD
4x6TB Dell Enterprise 7200RPM SAS (24TB total usable)

Whitebox #2 (Offsite backup of R510)

I7 4770
Asus Maximus Vi Hero
16GB DDR3 1600MHz
Asus Radeon HD6850
128GB SSD
8x6TB Dell Enterprise 7200RPM SAS (48TB total usable)

And a humble PiZero running PiVPN and PiHole

Kei · 18 May 2019 at 23:08

Cisco 1921 ISR with VA-DSL-A EHWIC
Juniper EX3300 24P switch
D-Link DAP-2695 WAP
HP 1910-8G

Homemade server using a mixture of freebies, stuff I've picked up cheap and some new bits.
I5 9600K
Asus Prime Z390-A
16GB Teamgroup 3000
Mellanox Connect-X 3 10Gbe NIC (DOA, looking to replace with solarflare or intel NIC)
LSI 8888ELP Raid controller
Intel RES2SV240 SAS expander
128GB Samsung SSD
7x 2TB WD Se (RAID 5, 10.8TB usable)

Stephanie Peterson · 18 May 2019 at 23:25

Started mine today, managed switch, new proper managed AP, HP microserver on way which will replace my pi doing pihole/dns. Will be running pfsense on it with other bits an bobs if the Vodafone router doesnt play me up. Got sfp available on the switch so might connect it up with that, Poe as well so i dont need to run power to the AP.

Had to run power into the cupboard, have an old box of 5e and a small patch panel to go in for cabling duties which will be "fun" to build!! Going to keep me occupied for a long while.

Rabtech · 20 May 2019 at 11:00

HP Gen 8 Microserver - Xeon 1260L, 16GB ECC, 2 x 240GB SSD's RAID 0, 2 x 3TB WD Green RAID 1 - Hyper V, AD, DNS, DHCP, Pihole, File/Print, Unifi Controller, Remote workstation VM's
HP Prodesk 600 G1 Mini - Backup server (Veeam Community Edition)
Netgear GS724T 24 port Switch
Ubiquity Edgerouter 4 (w/OpenVPN server and 2 x L2TP IPSEC site to site tunnels running)
Ubiquity AC-Lite Access Point
APC Smart UPS 1500va
Ikea 'Lack' table (Lack rack)

TechMinerUK · 20 May 2019 at 14:51

Home Lab 1
(Housed in cupboard with network rack on wall for rackmount switches)
Host 1 - HP ML110 G9 - Xeon E5-2620, 24GB DDR4 ECC, 2x 1TB HDD (RAID1), 2x 800GB SSD (RAID1), 2x 1Gb/s NIC
Host 2 - Dell T20 - Xeon E3-1225V3, 32GB DDR3 ECC, 2x 2TB HDD (Storage Spaces Mirror), 2x 256GB SSD (RAID1), 4x 1Gb/s NIC
Backup Server - Dell T20 - Pentium G3220, 16GB DDR3 ECC, 1x 128GB SSD, 2x 2TB HDD (Storage Spaces Mirror)
Router - SonicWALL SoHo
Switch - HP 1820-24G
WAPs - UniFi UAP AC-Lite
VMs - DC1, DC2, File Server, Steam Cache, RDS Gateway, WDS, UniFi Controller, Game Server, Lab VMs

Home Lab 2 (Site to Site)
(Housed in hallway with network rack on wall for rackmount switches)
Host 1 - Lenovo TS140 - Xeon E3-1226V3, 16GB DDR3 ECC, 2x 120GB SSD (RAID1), 2x 2TB HDD (Storage Spaces Mirror)
Backup Server - HP Microserver G7 - AMD Turion 2, 8GB DDR3 ECC, 3x 1TB HDD (Storage Spaces Striped)
Router - SonicWALL TZ200
Switch - HP 1810-24G
WAPs - UniFi UAP AC-Lite and UniFi UAP AC-LR
VMs - DC1/File Server, Emby

Colo/Azure
AZVM1 - A2 VM for DC replication

Si. · 23 May 2019 at 07:00

Some nice setups, here.

Gone are my days of running large home labs and I use Azure these days for testing (Using MSDN credit). However I am running an Intel Nuc at home with 32gb RAM, ESXi, 250gb SSD and 1TB Spinning disk. Just running Unifi Controller, PiHole, and a Windows 10 desktop. I find th eNuc an ideal home device, very low power, silent, and powerful enough for what I need.

Network is simple with a Unifi USG, Unifi 8 port POE switch and AC Pro.

Storage I have 2 Synologies: a 1817+ and 1515+.

Just curious, how many people are allowing external access to their Labs, EG VPN or even RDP? I currently don't but thinking of setting up VPN access via the USG.

ChrisD. · 23 May 2019 at 07:28

Si. said:
Just curious, how many people are allowing external access to their Labs, EG VPN or even RDP? I currently don't but thinking of setting up VPN access via the USG.

I'm running OpenVPN on my QNAP NAS, I'm not a fan of the USG VPN out of the box and setting up OpenVPN on it is not straight forward.

the-evaluator · 23 May 2019 at 07:57

Si. said:
Just curious, how many people are allowing external access to their Labs, EG VPN or even RDP? I currently don't but thinking of setting up VPN access via the USG.

I'm running an OpenVPN virtual appliance on my ESXi box.

Rabtech · 23 May 2019 at 23:53

ChrisD. said:
I'm running OpenVPN on my QNAP NAS, I'm not a fan of the USG VPN out of the box and setting up OpenVPN on it is not straight forward.

Amen to this, on the plus side I did get to learn quite a lot about OpenVPN whilst configuring it on my edgerouter 4, performance is dire however ~12Mb/s up and down - I've tried loads of things to improve the speed but to no avail. I bought this router as I didn't want to run an OpenVPN VM (which I've tested and works great), so I'm a little disappointed. I get very good speeds from my L2TP IPSec site to site tunnels as they are hardware accelerated but for laptop roaming use most public wifi points have issues with this VPN type.

memyselfandi · 25 May 2019 at 19:35

I used to VPN via one of my QNAP NASes but moved that functionality to a docker container on one of my Gen8 Microservers and found that that performed a lot lot better. Quicker to connect and faster throughput.

Thinking about configuring Docker Swarm or Kubernetes at the moment so that if I take down the Docker host I can have the container auto restart on one of the other Docker hosts. But haven't got around to it yet.

andy_mk3 · 25 May 2019 at 19:45

R710, 2x X5670's, 64GB RAM, 12TB storage & 2x 512GB SSD cache. Running unRAID with various VM's and dockers.

R210ii, E3-1230v2, 12GB RAM, some SSD storage. Running pfSense.

HP 2510G-24 switch.

APC Smart UPS 1500va.

Draytek Vigor 130.

MacRS4 · 30 May 2019 at 10:58

I use a couple of Mac Mini 2018 6 core i7s with 64Gb RAM. They work brilliantly, are quiet, and relatively low power.

Greg0986 · 30 May 2019 at 22:52

Just went from 128GB of DDR4 in my Gen9 to 768GB

No one needs this much RAM.

Armageus · 30 May 2019 at 23:09

Greg0986 said:
Just went from 128GB of DDR4 in my Gen9 to 768GB

No one needs this much RAM.

Lol I would love that much in my servers at work

Deleted member 77746 · 10 Jun 2019 at 09:32

Greg0986 said:
Just went from 128GB of DDR4 in my Gen9 to 768GB

No one needs this much RAM.

(1981) Bill Gates - "640K ought to be enough for anybody.

ChrisD. · 10 Jun 2019 at 16:40

Armageus said:
Lol I would love that much in my servers at work

I've just installed 8x HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 compute modules for a customer, each with 1TB of RAM and all flash storage.

Armageus · 10 Jun 2019 at 16:57

ChrisD. said:
I've just installed 8x HPE Synergy 480 Gen10 compute modules for a customer, each with 1TB of RAM and all flash storage.

I'm not at all bitter....

(DL380p Gen8 Database servers at work with only 32Gb RAM at present as currently running 2008R2)

ChrisD. · 10 Jun 2019 at 17:03

Jesus, you need an upgrade? We can sell you stuff.