Show us your home lab

Andrew Moore

Andrew Moore

Andrew Moore

Soldato
Joined
20 Jul 2009
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Location
The bleak North East arm pit of Britain
As title really, I cant see a dedicated thread which blows my mind but then again there are a hell of a lot of dedicated threads to certain servers and/or gear.

Anyway, what have you got and what do you use them for? I'm in need of inspiration for mine.

https://flic.kr/p/2pFtBi1

- ATEN PE6108G PDU for easy powering down of equipment if I am away from the home
- Ubiquiti UDM SE running the CCTV, firewall, VPN
- TrendNET TGE-TP182 for explansion and other POE requiring bits of equipment
- Custom 3U server using old junk (server 1) currently on latest release Ubuntu Pro but with an Win11 Pro MB tied license if I find anything I cant do with Linux and have to use windows again.
- Other 3U server which I may swap in if I find I need the extra power (server 2). Win11 Pro tied to MB but I doubt it'll ever get used.

Server 1 - 3400G, 32GB DDR3000, 1TB P5 NVME, B450i, 4 port SATA controller, 4x 16TB EXOS recerts, 3x 8TB WD reds, 550W Antec Earth Watts
Server 2 - 5950x, 64GB DDR3200, 1TB 980 Pro NVME, B550i, NVME to 6* SATA card, 6Gb A2000, 750w Antec Earth Watts

All storage in Server 1 will get transplanted to Server 2 should I make this particular hardware swaps but as it stands, the power envelope additions for what I current use which is JUST a plex server would be a bit pointless.


Current use, nothing but a Plex server on server 1. I may dabble with ProxMox, Kubemetes, Docker. I'm undecided as it stands but I don't want to have a play.

There is a possibility I may take on a single 1U chassis to add the 3400G system in with the EXOS drives to run a standalone proxmox server (an 1U PSU will also be required) and to then pick up an 2U chassis to house the 5950x system with the WD reds and A2000. I'll be able to ditch the m.2 to SATA card and with some luck might find an m.2 to 10G SFP card unless I go headless and ditch the A2000 (I'd rather not). This gives me the facility to run what i already have in the 3U all be it with a reduced amount of storage 24/7 with the second 2U in the rack being used only when I want to and have time to power it up to have a play.

I've got plenty of other older bits of kit kicking about that I may need to find a home for such as an ML350e and some older Pi3s that could be fun to integrate somehow.


So, what have you? Show em! :D
 
theres been a few thread and mention of it before like:

Home Labs

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...
forums.overclockers.co.uk forums.overclockers.co.uk
&

Good Cheap Server - HP Proliant Microserver 4 BAY - OWNERS THREAD

yep id like to keep it but it pees off the likes of Avalon that im still using it in 2024 :( IIRC it was around 2010 or so that I got my first..? Can you imagine if the rest of technology / hardware could have a similar longevity..?! Context etc I understand, but they just keep ticking the...
forums.overclockers.co.uk forums.overclockers.co.uk

but yes redit and things like servethehome / Lawrence Systems are also good recources.
example

my homelab was sible old laptop now defunked, for a few years.

i'de debatig getting a few :

TRIGKEY 6 Core 12 Thread Mini Computer Desktop PC Ryzen 5 5560U around £240​

seem like a good deal. set up a few proxmox / xcp-ng clusters
but im space limited so what ever i get has to be small and compacked.
 
I've been meaning to post in this thread hoping my new MS-01's would have arrived but sadly they haven't! :(

In my lab I'm running the following (For now)
  • 1x HP Elite 600 G9 (64GB DDR5, Intel i5-12500T, 2x 1TB M.2 WD Blues) (To be replaced by 2x Minisforum MS-01 12600H units) - Hyper-V Host (Server 2022)
  • 1x QNAP TS-963X (2x 12TB Seagate EXOs, 2x 800GB Samsung 840 Pro, 16GB DDR4) Storage for Hyper-V
  • 1x Lenovo TS140 (16GB DDR3 ECC, Intel Xeon E3-1225 V3, 2x 120GB SATA SSD) - Veeam B&R server (Server 022)
  • 1x Synology DS920+ (2x 20TB Seagate EXOs, 2x 4TB HGSTs, 8GB DDR4) - Veeam B&R repository
  • 1x Topton NUC (Intel N105, 16GB DDR5, 256GB SSD) - OPNSense router
  • 1x Beelink NUC (Intel N305, 16GB DDR5, 512GB SSD) - Emby server (Ubuntu 22.04)
  • 1x TP-Link SX3008F - iSCSI switch for QNAP and hosts
  • 1x UniFi 48 PoE - Core switch for APs and all other devices
  • 1x Raspberri Pi 2B+ - Zigbee2MQTT
On the hosts I have a variety of random guff:
  • 6x Windows Server 2022 VMs (2x DCs, 1x File server, 1x Enterprise CA, 1x Root CA, 1x VPN/GSA box)
  • 6x Ubuntu 22.04 VMs (1x cataloguing, 1x Graylog/syslog, 1x Docker/Grafana/InfluxDB/Prometheus/SNMP Exporter, 2x NGINX reverse proxies, 1x UniFi Controller)
  • 1x Home Asssitant (Controls lighting and automation)
Hopefully when my MS-01s arrive I'll be able to demote the Elite 600 G9 to a media PC or NVR for the cameras, that will then take over as the Hyper-V host/cluster and give me some more redundancy although I have been tempted to get a third but I'd much prefer to do that after the ones that I have ordered arrived (They said despatch at the end of March but alas no notification as of yet).

The main project at the moment is getting Grafana up and running with SNMP Exporter as whilst I have started to get my metrics all graphed nicely I'm struggling getting the SNMP data to show up to something legible, same goes with Graylog as some of the systems I am running have weird logs that need parsing :)
 
That’s a hell of a lot going on in a home lab. The MS-01s do look pretty cool, be sure to get some images and info up when you get them running.

How to you monitor what each system is doing, resources used etc? You use something like loggly?
 
Not even half of it. Planning to downsize the "active" homelab to the R730XD and the 4x flash arrays. The R730XD has 1TB RAM. The four flash arrays, is a total of 184TB of raw storage. Don't get me started on the spinning rust, it's over 2PB raw.

LcwYhHW.jpeg
 
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Andrew Moore said:
That’s a hell of a lot going on in a home lab. The MS-01s do look pretty cool, be sure to get some images and info up when you get them running.

How to you monitor what each system is doing, resources used etc? You use something like loggly?
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I certainly will when they get here, I'm chasing them weekly at this point! :D

Monitoring is a work in progress as I've played with a few bits over the years and have yet to find a "boxed" solution that dies everything I want so at the moment I'm working on the following:

- Email notifications for Veeam, PSAD, Fail2Ban
- Grafana/InfluxDB/Prometheus for resource monitoring e.g. CPU, RAM, Disk and network utilisation
- Graylog for log management and feeding Grafana

Eventually, I'd like to get a proper dashboard setup in Grafana with some log monitoring so I get an email or a push notification if something stops working but its taking me a little while to get used to processing SNMP into Prometheus and then getting Grafana to display it in a readable format :)
 
Greg0986 said:
Not even half of it. Planning to downsize the "active" homelab to the R730XD and the 4x flash arrays. The R730XD has 1TB RAM. The four flash arrays, is a total of 184TB of raw storage. Don't get me started on the spinning rust, it's over 2PB raw
Click to expand...
Good gravy! I think that's more storage in one photo than I have seen in my entire life!

What on earth are you running to need all that? :D
 
TechMinerUK said:
Good gravy! I think that's more storage in one photo than I have seen in my entire life!

What on earth are you running to need all that? :D
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Suprisingly not a lot. The top DL360 Gen9 is my main proxmox server, which runs everything I need bar Plex (unifi network controller, pihole, nextcloud, netboox.xyz, lancache). It has 256GB RAM and 8 1.92TB SSDs.

The next three I want to test out proxmox high availability, just not had the time Each has 256GB RAM. The DL360 G8 is just used for Clonezilla. I do a lot of drive imaging for work and this just helps massively.

The R730XD, R720 and DL380 Gen8 are storage servers mainly. The R730XD is my newest addition and I need to have a plan for it. I am thinking of consolodating the R720 and DL380 Gen8 into one box so that might be my next move. They are just backups of everything else.

The flash arrays are empty but as above that will change soon.

The bottom box is an 84 bay HDD chassis, and I have two of them. They were used for Chia but unfortunately due to the halving, it's not worth the electricity to run them now.

Also to note, I don't run everything all at once :D
 
killsta said:
Mine is a mess compared to most on here. Lets call it 'functional'.

Click to expand...
Mine for years was this sort of, thing, a couple of Lack tables bolted/butchered together and some wheels on the bottom. Worked well, got battered but it was functional furniture for keeping a coffee on top of until that ended well..
 
Greg0986 said:
Suprisingly not a lot. The top DL360 Gen9 is my main proxmox server, which runs everything I need bar Plex (unifi network controller, pihole, nextcloud, netboox.xyz, lancache). It has 256GB RAM and 8 1.92TB SSDs.

The next three I want to test out proxmox high availability, just not had the time Each has 256GB RAM. The DL360 G8 is just used for Clonezilla. I do a lot of drive imaging for work and this just helps massively.

The R730XD, R720 and DL380 Gen8 are storage servers mainly. The R730XD is my newest addition and I need to have a plan for it. I am thinking of consolodating the R720 and DL380 Gen8 into one box so that might be my next move. They are just backups of everything else.

The flash arrays are empty but as above that will change soon.

The bottom box is an 84 bay HDD chassis, and I have two of them. They were used for Chia but unfortunately due to the halving, it's not worth the electricity to run them now.

Also to note, I don't run everything all at once :D
Click to expand...

It's amusing how tech ages, if cost wasn't an issue you could literally replace all of those servers with a single DL385 Gen11. It would undoubtedly be cheaper to run as well, albeit setting you back tens of thousands.

Do you also have an off-site backup? If not and your data is valuable what do you do in the scenario of fire/flood/electrical surge/malware? I can't see you running out of the house with one of those under your arm :cry:
 
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Not really my lab as such, but was under orders to find some way to hide the mess of wires/boxes in the sitting room where all the entry points are for the internet feeds. Cue a quick trip to Ikea and a ghetto install shoving the kit in a blanket box that could have the lid put on it and keep everything i could out of sight. Realised that the holes in the design were fine for ethernet and rj11 cables but not for three pin plugs so had to whip out a hole saw so the UPS power feed could come in through the bottom.

 
BigT said:
Not really my lab as such, but was under orders to find some way to hide the mess of wires/boxes in the sitting room where all the entry points are for the internet feeds. Cue a quick trip to Ikea and a ghetto install shoving the kit in a blanket box that could have the lid put on it and keep everything i could out of sight. Realised that the holes in the design were fine for ethernet and rj11 cables but not for three pin plugs so had to whip out a hole saw so the UPS power feed could come in through the bottom.
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zuZZKhl.png


Is this one of those CWWK / Topton machines? What do you use it for?
 
nst68 said:
Is this one of those CWWK / Topton machines? What do you use it for?
Click to expand...
It is. One of the many clones and I forget what it was branded as. Running a Celeron 3865U and getting on a bit now. Was the cheapest I could get with AES-NI support at the time to offload the OpenVPN work to. However times have moved on and I am eyeing up an N100 based replacement. It can just about route at Gbps to Virgin with no other fancy stuff going on but CPU utilisation gets high.

It runs pfSense and is effectively a router appliance. It takes the BTOR modem and Virgin box in modem mode as feeds in and provides failover between them in the event of an outage. Also acts as VPN server (need to switch to opnSense and Wireguard really), provides policy based routing with a VPN client to keep some stuff on the network behind VPN at all times, segments my IoT & guest VLANs as well as all the other normal stuff a router does except wireless. The third cable that goes to the switch then flows through ethernet up to my office PoE+ Switch which then powers all the UniFi APs to provide wireless around the house.
 
BigT said:
It is. One of the many clones and I forget what it was branded as. Running a Celeron 3865U and getting on a bit now. Was the cheapest I could get with AES-NI support at the time to offload the OpenVPN work to. However times have moved on and I am eyeing up an N100 based replacement. It can just about route at Gbps to Virgin with no other fancy stuff going on but CPU utilisation gets high.

It runs pfSense and is effectively a router appliance. It takes the BTOR modem and Virgin box in modem mode as feeds in and provides failover between them in the event of an outage. Also acts as VPN server (need to switch to opnSense and Wireguard really), provides policy based routing with a VPN client to keep some stuff on the network behind VPN at all times, segments my IoT & guest VLANs as well as all the other normal stuff a router does except wireless. The third cable that goes to the switch then flows through ethernet up to my office PoE+ Switch which then powers all the UniFi APs to provide wireless around the house.
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I'm looking at getting one to run opnSense, HA and Z2M all under Proxmox.

I was going to get a N305 but don't know if a N100 will handle everything.
 
I guess it depends on how much you're planning to stress the system. If you're going to be doing IDS and all that on *sense and have a fast internet connection then you're not going to regret the extra performance of the N305. The only thing that puts me off these tiny cases and the N305 is the extra heat they have the potential to generate. I've seen models completely passively cooled and some than have a small fan. Because I only run it as a router appliance in my sitting room I need passively cooled and so would feel "safer" with an N100. But if I was OK with actively cooled then I'd definitely look at the N305 as the price difference has shrunk a lot and depending on the application you can get twice the performance.

When I ran HA and Z2M containerised on my old UnRaid box the CPU never seemed stressed and that was an old 6th Gen i5 I think. I don't think they'll need the extra grunt. I'm not au fait with Proxmox so no idea how much overhead the hypervisor needs. RAM might be an issue - I think the two chips have different capabilities with addressable RAM from memory if that's important to you.
 
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