New to the homelab game as of about a month ago. I'm a software developer consultant by trade so I wanted some hardware to try out things I'm building for clients without having to constantly spin up and down cloud resources or put down the same amount of cash as they do paying for them.

• Netgate SG-5100 pfSense Firewall
• TP-Link 24-Port Gigabit Ethernet Unmanaged Switch SG1024
• 3 x Google Wifi AP
• 3 z83 Fanless Mini PC's (Kubernetes Cluster HA control plane)
• 5 x Intel NUC8i5BEH Quad-Core i5-8259U 2.3GHz, 8GB DDR4, 240GB SSD (Kubernetes Cluster workers)
• 1 x Dell r610 2x Xeon E5640 192GB RAM 6x600GB 10K SAS (just got this not sure what I'm going to do with it yet)
• APC UPS 1500VA

All of it except for the google wifi AP's in this horrific open cage 42U rack my dad got from the hospital where he works. It has some type of thread for the mounting holes that not a single screw in my house seems to fit, so i just drill the holes out to a large enough size and put a nut on the back. Also the holes are not evenly spaced relative to each other, so there are odd spaces inbetween the shelves. No clue why anyone would want that, but it was a free rack so I'm not going to complain!

Future Plans

• Want to setup hybrid environment with Google Cloud Platform resources. VPN of some sort.
• NAS
• Get a rack thats not a pain in the ass to work with.

Glad to see this sticky being revived — especially with the endless deluge of 'what do you use those homelab for?' posts.

In any case, mine hasn't changed much since the last time I posted about it, except that I just got two more avamars to bring the proxmox/ceph cluster up to 5 hosts (more ideal for ceph), replaced all the CPUs with E5-2680s in one and 2643s in the rest (pulled from my HP servers that noone wants to buy :/), and replaced my 24 port ICX6610 with another 48 port unit.

I also got an ICX7250-48P that I really want to replace my 6610 stack with (lower noise/power consumption and honor-based licensing), but I don't want to lose dedicated stacking ports (have to use some of the 10G ports to stack the 7250s) so I'm conflicted on whether or not to do that. Between the dual 10G ceph interfaces in each server and dual connections for the wlc, that's already 12 of the 16 10G ports I'd have if I grab another 7250, and stacking would take at least another 2. So idk...

Also always on the hunt for more cheap 3TB+ drives to expand the ceph storage pool.

New additions to the homelab?

Brand new batteries and Ethernet management card for the hp r5500 UPS

APU2 running OPNsense, love this thing!

brocade icx6450-48P to run some POE stuffs (could pull the old switch but im lazy)

3ea aruba ap-345 and 1ea IAp-305 all run off POE. (Best thing ever)

2ea brocade icx6430-c12 to replace dumb switches I had around. One is powering the iap-305 in the shed.

A thunderbolt3 to SFP+ adapter. My macbook pro now gets glorious 10gbe! Very handy for moving ISO's around

Some MM fiber, mpo-lc breakouts and 10gbe sr transceivers so i can make use of the MPO cables I pulled through the house awhile ago!

Shorter patch cables to reduce the lab gore.

I wish I had switched to the aruba AP's an OPNsense long ago. Soooooo much nicer to manage than 4 Asus routers/AP's. Two button presses updates firmware in all 4 AP's. Or the router. No more reconfiguring everything and flashing each item....

Old kit still in use:

Dell t620:dual e5-2680v2, 256gb ram. 10gbe and 40gbe nic's, random hard drives

Old custom built server: e3-1245v2, 32gb ram. 3x10TB wd red in raidz1. Running ubuntu,

Icx6450-24 (should really pull this now) Hp r5500 ups

Currently running:

• Intel NUC7i5BNH (Proxmox) - PVE_NODE_01
  • Pi-hole (LXC)
  • Unifi-Controller (Ubuntu Server 16.04)
  • Plex (Windows Server 2012R2)
  • Grafana (Ubuntu Server 16.04)
  • ADDC-01 (Windows Server 2016) - This does Active Directory, DHCP, DNS.

​

• Intel NUC7i5BNH (Proxmox) - PVE_NODE_02
  • pfSense
  • DokuWiki (Ubuntu Server 16.04)
  • HAProxy (Ubuntu Server 16.04)
  • UNMS (Ubuntu Server 16.04)
  • NextCloud (Ubuntu Server 16.04) - Not in use currently
  • FreePBX - Just for testing
  • Zabbix (Ubuntu Server 16.04)

​

• Ubiquiti Unifi Switch 24 port (non POE)
• Ubiquiti Unifi Switch 8 60W
• Ubiquiti EdgeSwitch 8 150W (Core Switch - Layer 3 )
• Ubiquiti Unifi AC AP Pro
• Synology DS918+ (6TB Raid 10)

Future Plans:

• Purchase a smaller cabinet due to size of lab
• eventually purchase a UPS... power outages haven't been an issue... yet.
• Eventually look into creating ADDC-02 as a VM on Proxmox or in AWS
• Setup Apache Guacamole to play around with
• Look into a Supermicro Xeon D-1518 1U system to replace the nuc's (I'm a fan of rackmount systems and of Supermicro).

PVE 1

• AMD AM3+ Opteron 3280 Octacore
• 24 GB ECC UDIMM
• 2* EVO 850 250 GB @ ZFS Mirror
• 6* 1TB 2.5" HDD @ ZFS RaidZ1
• Dual NIC
• Short Chenbro 2HE case runns 24/7 with 52W @10 % load. Running only LXC with PiHole, Nextcloud inkl. separated elasticsearch, 2* Wordpress, Jellyfin, Debian 10 with GUI, searx, wallabag, aptcache, bookstack, guacamole, reverse proxy, iLibrarian, gitea.

PVE 2 (cluster with PVE 3)

• R710
• 2x L5640 6C/12T = 24T in total
• 96 GB DDR3 ECC Reg
• 2x 860 Evo 500 GB
• H310
• GTX 1650
• 10Gbit NIC this runs only on demand. Some VMs for encoding, gaming and such things

PVE 3

• Opteron 3280 Octacore
• 16 GB DDR3 non-ECC
• 2 HE long case (FanTec (?)
• 250 GB Sandisk-SSD
• Dualport NIC this runs only on demand as well; clustered with PVE 2. For testing and if I need to combine the horse power of the two servers (for example for ffmpeg).

PVE 4

• A10 6800K
• 12GB DDR3
• 120GB SSD
• 3*2TB @ZFS RaidZ1
• 1.5 TB EXT4
• 4HE Case this server is for Backup. Nothing else running; maybe adding it to the ffmpeg distributed encoding.

Fileserver

• Openmediavault 5
• i5 2500
• 16 GB DDR3
• 4* 3TB + 2* 4TB in ZFS striped mirror; need to add 6 more HDDs
• 10Gbit NIC
• H310 Fileserver; running ~8h/day. This needs to be replaced somewhen with something with ECC. I'm thinking of replacing PVE 1 with something less power consuming but with ECC and equal power (hard to find!) because the RAM is full all the time and 2*8GB ddr3 UDIMM ECC is too expensive here and then use the Opteron 3280 as Fileserver.

Network:

• Mikrotik heX S router (with 4 VLANs)
• Mikrotik CSS326 24 Port Gbit Switch + 2*SFP+
• NanoPi Neo 512MB as OpenVPN Fallback and PiHole

everything in a 24U Rack

Still running my trusty HP microserver, a gen8. It's still doing file serving and Nextcloud, web and email for a couple of domains, a bunch of containers with the usual collection of linux ISO retrieval and inspection tools, and one IRC bot. Last week I switched a stick of RAM, bringing memory from 6GB to 12, and now I'm toying with VMs, and OH GODS WHY DIDN'T I DO THIS EARLIER.

Plans for the future still involve swapping the Celeron for a Xeon (1260L or maybe I'll splurge on a 1270v2), and after that I want to redo the base OS (currently a messy build on top of CentOS), and being able to run the critical stuff in a VM (and thereby being able to temporarily shove it onto another machine) is very welcome. After that, I might also consolidate some stuff from a Pi 3 and 4 back to the server.

Next stop after that is getting rid of the provider's router. Still not sure whether I want to go with a Mikrotik/EdgeRouter or OPNSense, and in case of the latter, whether I want to run it on bare metal (I can dumpster dive at work for a Sandy bridge i5 box with dual NICs, not sure if I want to foot the power bill for it) or virtualized (which would mean adding more network ports to the gen8 and deal with network outage whenever the server is down). I have OPNSense running in a VM now, so far I like it. Might give RouterOS a spin after that.

It'll all take a while, because with two little tikes free time is at a premium and I tend to overanalyze things a bit...

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Hardware:

• Intel NUC8i7BEH
  • 1TB Samsung EVO 970
  • 512GB Samsung 850 Pro
  • 64GB DDR4
  • Thunderbolt 3 10GBase-T Adapter
  • Thunderbolt 3 OWC Thunderbay 6 drive bay
    • 2x Seagate 5TB 2.5" 5400RPM (RDMd to media server)
    • 1TB WD Blue SSD
• D-Link DGS-1100-08P 8 Port Smart/L2 PoE switch
• Ubiquiti Unifi UAC-AP-Pro
• Cyberpower 1500VA Pure Sinewave UPS
  • USB: passthrough to pfSense

Software:

• VMware ESXi 6.7:
  • pfSense
    • OpenVPN
    • NUT UPS monitoring
  • Active Directory
  • FreeNAS TimeMachine
    • 1TB SSD RDM
  • Debian media server/ethernet bridge
    • 2x 5TB drives in soft raid 0
  • FreeBSD:
    • nginx
    • cacti
    • postfix
    • various tinkers
  • Ubuntu 19 vnc linux desktop for whatever

VLANS:

• LAN
• WAN
• Blackhole
• DMZ
• Guest
• DVR
• AV
• MGMT

SSIDs:

• Internal (RADIUS 802.1x)
• Guest
• DMZ (IoT)
• DVR (cameras)

My NUC has two network interfaces, I built one vswitch on the 1Gb nic and one vswitch on the 10Gb nic. I bridge them with the debian media server box, and I have a Cat6a cable under the house to the office, which has an iMac connected at 10Gb.

Getting the Thunderbolt stuff to work required installing a couple of vib files into esxi but it wasn't very hard.

This setup is almost completely silent, and lives behind my entertainment center in the living room.

My internet is bridged and plugged right into the switch which has a port set in untagged mode to the WAN VLAN, which is then trunked to the pfSense vm. ESXi is trunked to the switch with the blackhole vlan as native and not routable.

I ordered a MikroTik 4 SFP+ switch to eliminate the linux ethernet bridge, but after some iperf3 benchmarks it turns out that the linux bridge between vswitches is faster. Software defined networks really do have the advantage. I ended up returning the switch.

Any glaring issues? My main concern is some weird layer 2 hack on the Dlink switch which does touch the internet :-/

Just configured a 'new to me' Quantum LTO5 tape library in place of my old Sony AIT-4, working beautifully, but has highlighted my file server as a bottleneck (I knew it was anyway, but grr...)

Tar for file level backups, Veeam for VMs, can now upgrade to newer versions of both Linux and Windows (and soon Veeam v10!) due to not needing to support SCSI. :)

I've had a very small "homelab" that I wish was more centrally located. My biggest goal is getting a cat6a from my attic to my crawlspace and then running wires into every room. Currently, I'm using DirecTVs MoCa adapters to send data from my downstairs network "shelf" to my bonus room 19u rack.

Here's my list:

• Araknis Router
• Netgear Smart 5p switch
• 3x Araknis APs
• Dell Powerconnect 8p Switch
• Dell Powerconnect 24p Switch
• HP Proliant DL380 G7 (32GB RAM, ~2TB, 1x SSD & 3x 600GB SAS 10K)
• Dell Powerconnect 48p Switch (unused at the moment)

I use the server for an AD environment to play around with various exploits for things like cybersecurity. I also have VMs for a webserver, TIG (Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana) Stack, PiHole, pfSense (Still working on learning it out and possibly deploying it), and HomeAssistant.

All in all, its been pretty useful. The resources I'm not using will typically get eaten up by a BOINC project, to help with research.

I have 3 VLANs, 1 Guest Network, Home Automation, and a wayyyyssss to go with my network as a whole.

• Just finished setting up a QNAP TS-1685 - that's a monster of a machine love it. Consolidated there all my storage. Bummed that qts doesn't allow storage volumes on third party NVMe. Eventually I will find a way to enable it manually (I have a couple of Intel DCs) and also wanted to mention that File Station is an idiot^(*)
• Moved from an 8 port 10G Netgear switch to the Mikrotik CRS312-4C+8XG-RM. Love it. Reviews complained about noise but I don't hear it - probably a newer version improved that. Too bad I already ordered Noctuas based on said reviews.
• Turned off most of my lab to reorganize and consolidate storage in the NAS. Just one dual xeon (E5 v3) machine is on and worryingly it runs everything I need without breaking a sweat so in theory there's no reason to own the second dual xeon machine, the two Xeon D-1521 machines, Dell T1700 Xeon SFF
• After I get back from holidays I plan to rack most of my kit in one or two portable rack cases. Thinking Gator or SKB, thank you u/codacarlson for the inspiration. Having trouble deciding on one bigger case (6-8 Us) or a couple of cases (4+2 or something the like) and also if I should rack only the small kit or get rack cases for the big machines too. I'm eyeing these cases for the E-ATX machines. Also can't decide on wether switch in the back or switch in the front + patch panel. First world problems I guess :) I'll use the time while traveling to sketch my rack cases.

^(*) if you move files with File Station while hidden files are not shown it will not move them but then it will delete them. Good thing I had backups.

I've got a pretty basic set up but it works well for me.

In the Main Rack:

• Ubiquiti USG Gateway
• Ubiquiti 16-Port Switch
• Ubiquiti AP-AC Lite x2
• Media PC for Kodi
• AMD 2-Core APU system that I put together super cheap from parts I got when the local Tiger Direct store went under.
• unRaid Server
• LGA1155 Based system with an i5 2500k that was left over after my last Gaming PC upgrade.
• Total capacity right now is 22TB with about 5TB free space.
• APC UPS. I'm in Florida and we get frequent 5-10 minute outages in the rainy season.
• An old Yamaha receiver I use for driving the speakers in my living room. I have it hooked up to an Amazon echo through a wire run through the wall and it works great. It would probably be cleaner to just get something like a Echo Link Amp but for $300... if it ain't broke don't fix it.

I just ordered an i7 2600 off of ebay last night to replace the 2500k. Four more threads will definitely help out but I really wanted it for VT-D support so I can finally pass through a graphics card and make my Media PC obsolete. I'm planning to recycle that guy into a stand up arcade cabinet eventually.

I've got a cheap 4 port netgear switch in the office for connecting my wife and I's PCs to the network. I've also got a couple rPi 3's and a rPi 4 that aren't doing anything right now. I need to find a use for them sooner or later.

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I'm back in the homelab world after about a year away. Basically, my career is at a bit of an intersection at the moment so I'm using my lab to learn new tools. I have:

• Dell PowerEdge R720 running Windows Server 2016
• Dell PowerVault MD1200 with 6x 6 TB HDD
• APC Smart-UPS 2000 VA (or thereabouts)
• UniFi networking gear
• APC NetShelter CX Mini 12U sound-reducing cabinet

My immediate goals here are to apply some things I've learned about best practices for racking IT equipment as well as documenting everything. I'm also re-learning the ins-and-outs of Windows Server 2016 and having to reconfigure how and where I do backups. One of the organizations I do advisory work for is looking at VDI, so I'll probably spin up a VDI infrastructure on my equipment to see what that's all about. I want to learn more about systems orchestration, management, and automation. I've been reading a lot about Ansible and PRTG, and I think I need to explore those more.

Like many of you, I'm sure, your home lab is not only the center of your computing and networking world, but a teaching tool for learning the latest things. If something breaks, that's probably a good thing!

Current hardware in my lab:

• Proxmox Cluster:
  • Quanta Windmill (Facebook/OCP server, 2 nodes)  
    • Per node: 2x E5-2620v2, 32GB ram, 120GB SSD Boot, 10GB SFP+ uplink, 1Gb nic, Radeon 7450 1gb.  
  • 1 Dell Wyse Thin Client 5060 (Tie breaker node)
    • AMD GX-424CC, 8Gb ram,120gb ssd boot
• Freenas Node (VM and data storage):
  • GA-890GPA-UD3H, Athlon(tm) II X2 260, 16GB ECC
  • 6 x 2tb Zfs raidz2, with 2 x 120GB SSD ZIL
  • Solarwind S7120 Dual 10GB SFP+ directly connected to Windmill nodes
• OPNSense Node HP 620t Plus, 4gb, 32gb ssd boot, intel 4 x1gb nic
• Dell Powerconnect 6248 Switch
• Ripe Probe
• 20U Network depth rack
• APC Smart-ups.
• 2 Liebert gxt2 UPS both in a failed state with "output switch open" errors, haven't found any info on what this error means.
• VM's: Mysql, Nextcloud, Plex, Rundeck, Confluence, VPN Jumphost, Linux desktop, Windows Desktops (8.1, 7, xp, 10), PXE server.

What's new:

• Tripp-Lite Smart Rack 25U, Just got this from Govdeals and I'm really liking this rack. I was able to disassemble the rack and carry the pieces to the basement without help. Having square holes with cage nuts is very pleasant compared to the threaded holes. The removable sides are a really convenient feature. Started migrating gear over this week, waiting on some rails for the Freenas and Windmill.
• New ICX6450-24 switch. My powerconnect didn't have SFP+ uplink modules and they seemed hard to come by and almost as expensive as a new switch so, I bought a new switch instead. I've started migrating everything to the new switch/new rack. I will be using the SFP+ ports instead of direct connects between my Freenas and Proxmox hosts. This will allow me to use the 10GB ports for other vlans besides storage.
• Building a case for my Pi's in a surplus military power distribution rackmount box. I originally used this to house a dual-socket 370/P2 PICMG motherboard, it's been gathering dust for years but, I couldn't part with it. One Pi will manage shutdowns/restore (WOL) triggers from the UPS and driving an LCD character display. Not sure yet what I'll do with the other two Pi's that will fit in the case.

My future plans:

• I'm looking to play with some more advanced networking topics. I've already messed around with VRRP/keepalived but, I'm looking to experiment with anycast/BGP for true active/active setups.
• Once my budget recovers from the server rack, switch, and rails maybe looking to add the following:
  • A 10GB/SFP+ card to my router, this would remove 4 network cables between the router/switch and allow more than 1gb transfers between vlans.
  • Move the Freenas to a new rackmount case and maybe a new CPU architecture, I could make use of more PCI-E bandwidth.

So a while ago I posted my network rack here. There's been some upgrades. I ditched the Fortigate 50B and put in an EdgeRouter X instead. The Edgerouter is definitely an upgrade. The network rack houses currently:

• QNAP TS-209 II NAS
• Buffalo WHR-HP-GN AP running DD-WRT (This will probably be relocated to a better location at some point)
• HP V1910-24 managed switch
• Macab Catline TV-over-Ethernet amplifier (still haven't gotten around to pulling a new antenna cable down for it so it still sits idle)
• Ubiquiti Edgerouter X
• Raspberry Pi 3 B

My home network is set up in two VLANs. One is for computers and the printer (scored a freebie SOHO laser combo with automatic feeder, the LCD backlight is out but I can live with that) and the other is for gaming consoles, smart TV's, IoT gadgets and everything that mostly need only internet access or are otherwise sketcy in the security department. The AP serves two separate SSID's for corresponding VLANs.

I bought a Dell 2950 a while back. I built a wall hanger for it since the only place with room for it was the back wall of the closet (yes, I know there's an alarm, the PERC battery is dead but a new one costs more than I paid for the server). I got it running ESXi and I had a spin with a couple of Linux installations but recently I got a hold of a Windows Server license from a liquidation sale so I'll be also installing some of that since that's what I'm most used to professionally and I feel most comfortable using.

Currently I'm working on setting up Open Media Server on the wall server, but I've run into some weird incompatibility issues with my TV's so that needs to be sorted out first before I'll move on to the next work items.

Speaking of next work items, I have some home automation stuff on the backburner brewing for the RasPi and some Arduinos and to that end I want to migrate all current services away from the RasPi to the Dell server. It's just running a dynamic DNS updater and VPN server for remote access into the home network and Deluge and VPN client for... deluging and VPN clienting...

Next item in the plan is to populate the server chassis with inexpensive but reliable drives and relegate the QNAP NAS for backup duties only. The 2950 chassis is the one 2,5" drive slots so I've got something like 8 slots in total, should be enough for a while.

Question:

I am currently running an Intel s1200BTS with a single XEON 1220 V2 and 32GB of ECC RAM -- it is for two things ZFS data hording and Nuxeo for sharing the photos and videos we acquire via a simple and safe URL when need be to known recipients-- since that data is already local on it.

The other machine is a nothing special "prosumer" fanless RAM filled monster with a teeny-tiny hard drive that sips electricity. Low end of fast and multicore... it doesn't need a fan on the CPU. It runs all the things. My local web servers, my graylog instance, my gitea instance, a DB, and a redis object server... (DB performance is "abysmal" regarding metrics across the board, but it has such a low workload that it is good enough.)

Lastly, I have a repurposed netbook running haproxy to handle remotely forwarded requests and home assistant.

The first machine, the Intel S1200BTS based one is "not great"... super picky RAM whitelist for modules that will let the board boot, 32GB RAM limit, e1000e network driver, really unsupported video somehow (currently using serial console to see boot messages and hangups in real time), no built-in RNG device. The thing is a dog...

I want to have two RAM filled monsters-- this file server one fails in a few ways listed above. Anyone running a nothing special quiet and economical server class board that isn't awful? What are you running?

Bit of a Hodge podge lab: Networking is all unifi, us-8-60w, nano hd and USG. Pi4 is my main docker host running most of my home automation stuff I'm currently setting up along with some energy monitoring (being fed by a pi zero w and some dodgy scripts). Basic n40 HP microserver server with 5x3tb zfs Finally have a desktop for running up test windows labs etc. For training with a i7 8700k, 64gb ram and 1.2tb of ssd storage.

What's coming next is HA for the docker systems I'm running and some more resilient storage than micro SD. More sensors for the house. New WAP as I need more range More storage for the lab box

Oh and external access to it all :) probably look at using azure authentication

Not much but keeps me busy!