State of the lab Feb 2018

by Michael

Buying a bunch of hardware is fun all on it's own but I want to make sure I am doing something useful with it. So, I built a homelab to play with services and support my software development efforts. Here is what I've built out and why.

What Hardware am I running

  • Dell Poweredge R510 8bay 1xL5630 6GB RAM
  • IBM X3650 M3 2x L5630 32GB RAM
  • HP ProCurve 1810-24G
  • Ubiquiti Edgerouter X SFP
  • Netgear NightHawk R7000
  • 2x Raspberry Pie 3B

What am I doing with it

Storage & backup

I used to run a simple mirrored array of 2 4GB drives in a Netgear Ready NAS but it was limited. I was getting slow transfer speeds which I blamed on the NAS but I now suspect that the spinning rust was the bottleneck. Anyhoo I have moved on to the gloriously cheap Dell R510 8bay. Yes the 12 bay is much cooler and the R710 can fit more ram but for a simple file server, cheapness won out.

I tested out Unraid and FreeNAS but I just couldnt justify the cost / inflexibility of either of them. ZFS loves ram, both need alot of disks, and neither handle adding disks well. So I went with SnapRaid + MergerFS. Super flexible backup with ok performance. When I need speed I run SSD.

Im using a mish mash of NFS, Samba, and iSCSI to share out my storage.

Virtualization

This is the playground. I can spin up whatever I like here and try things out. The IBM X3650 does this well because I stuck a couple solid state drives in its SFF bays and my two Xeon L5630 provide a bunch of threads at low TDP.

After dicking around with Proxmox I went back to ESXI. I am more comfortable with it and I just wanted to get up and running. I may go back at some future date or I might double down on Docker and run a swarm or Kubernetes.

What am I virtualizing?

  • Docker
  • NextCloud
  • Plex
  • Jenkins
  • GitLab
  • Windows w/ GPU passthrough for Steam
  • Nginx

Networking

I am not particularly focused on networking but I do need a robust secure network to make all this stuff play nice. I bought the managed switch because it was super cheap and I thought I might VLAN and lag some ports but I havent had a huge need for it. VLAN has some appeal tho and I will eventually split out guest wifi, IOT, and home.

I am running two network services on raspberry pis. I could easily virtualize them but I like being able to take down my primary server and not take down my network. I run pi-hole for my network wide ad blocking and local dns. I run PiVPN for OpenVPN remote access.