Home Labs

Michael Myers

Michael Myers

Michael Myers

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Joined
20 Oct 2002
Posts
1,186
Location
Northampton
Hi All

Thought it would be interesting to start a thread on home labs, what do you have hardware wise and what is it used for? What are your future plans?

I have recently moved from an old desktop machine to a Lenovo Think Centre M80q Gen 3, with an i5 12500T 6c/12t Processor and 32Gb DDR5 Ram.

I currently use XCP-NG 8.3 as a hypervisor and run a full Citrix CVAD test lab i.e. Domain, Azure AD Authentication, NetScaler Gateway for external access etc. as I work in that field.

The little M80q is handling 9 VM's fine with low power usage under 20watt.

Future plan is to upgrade to 64GB DDR5 when prices come down, and id like to build a physical pfsense firewall on another small machine so i can emulate a full production environment.

What have you got?
 
I have a Dell PowerEdge T610 with 2 x 5670 Xeon processors, 96GB RAM and 6TB storage running ESXi.
Cisco 2960G switch.
Eero wireless networking.
HP Proliant Microserver with a Xeon processer, 16GB Ram, 8TB storage running as an Unraid server.

No upgrades planned at the moment - in fact I just decommissioned 3 Microservers as surplus to requirements now.
 
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Mostly a few Raspberry Pi's now, my gaming rig is used for the odd bit of gaming but mostly for containers now and my Mac Mini and my Macbook Pro have enough umph to host a few too. I used to have the whole lack rack full of kit and the electric bill to go with it.

Production at work is my home lab now :D
 
maybe try adding some cloud vms under Oracles free tair might be worth a look.

my work redundant equipment used to be my "home lab" but our offices are now closed on weekends. so have to play at home now, not really a bad thing.

i dont have much to add. some old laptops varing specs, & 2x Microservers,
nothing really running though i have a whole list of things to add and play with.

hyperVisors : Proxmox / XCP-NG / hyper-v - dropping vmware at the moment its no likely its going to pick up any time soon, but i did love ESXI as it was my first hypervisor.

planned:
Core infrastructure :
domain / proxy / firewall / wifi ect
Storage
core network infrastructure <- a little upfront cost

Personal :
Media services
phone backup services
backup services
steam caching service

work / self training :
clustering / high availability / migration or services
Packaging / deployment and testing apps i.e. for work
terraform / kubernetes
linux os / windows os
Minotoring - network / PCs / services
and an assortment of other stuff all tied togeather

sandbox area / no internet access.
 
VMware vSphere home lab = Supermicro AMD SoC Motherboard M11SDV-8C+-LN4F, Intel NUC & Synology DS1821+, Unifi Switch APC UPS. Licensing is provided by my employer under NFR (Nested vSAN, NSX & vROps).
MS Azure Subscription = Provided by my employer under Visual Studio license
Veeam Repo = old Seagate Nas

Mainly used to get familiar with products to support presales activities, NFR/Trial licenses provided by vendors also houses my personal media server & domain.

Wouldn't mind increasing the memory from 128GB to 256GB, or adding a second Supermicro box, but my home extension taking up all spare cash currently!
 
I've got the following:

Workstation - AMD 1950X with 64GB of RAM and NVME raid.

Server - AMD 2600 with 32GB of RAM, SATA SSD raid, with a 2TB Intel PCIE drive

Storage - Pentium Gold with 32GB of RAM, 16TB of spinning rust, and an SSD cache.

All of its sat on a 10GB network. All the boxes have ECC ram, the server and storage nodes are the only bits that stay up 24/7.

Needs a bit of a refresh really - but performance is pretty good. I've got a Ryzen 1700 and motherboard for it to put in the storage node once I get some time.

It all gets used for development and experimentation with K8s, and Elasticsearch (I'm a solutions architect). I've got a 1070GTX in the workstation - so it gets used for occasional bit of gaming and CAD as well.
 
I would only like to have a proper home lab if the main rack servers were silent and water cooled.Not custom watercooled, but nicely done by a manufacturer.
Well either that or have some form of accoustically silent case.
Unfortunately the watercooled solutions from OEM's are really only for higher end compute gear in the 100's of thousands.
 
Server with 3950x, 64GB DD4 Ram, 512gb NVMe, 2TB HDD in raid 0 and 3 NIC cards.

Use this for VMware and Azure stuff.
 
I've gone a bit more 'normal' with my build after I got rid of my Gen8 Microserver setup.
Now just running a Node 304 iTX case
Gigabyte X570 Wifi Pro iTX Board
AMD Ryzen 5-3400G
32Gb DDR4
1x 250Gb SSD OS (Windows 10)
1x 500Gb VM Storage Drive
2x 4Gb HDD, 1x 6Gb HDD, 1x 8Gb HDD all as data pool (Stablebit Drivepool & Scanner)

Runs a handful of VM's but that's it these days.
 
Have a few servers, mainly just using my DL380 Gen 9 LFF one now for OMV and dockers, although have a DL380 Gen9 SFF, Microserver Gen8 running Xpenology and a Synology 4 bay too.

Older pic before I went to the LFF version of the server:

W1pwfME.jpg
 
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