Very ad hoc homelab that has grown through the years. From bottom shelf upwards:
HP EliteDesk refurb from ebay, 4x1G ethernet, running Proxmox with 1 VM running OPNSense for routing, primary Unbound DNS, and Adguard Home for ad blocking
Cyberpower UPS
Raspberry Pi 1 running Nut, monitoring the UPS and sending shutdown cmds to everything else as needed
HP Printer/scanner
QNAP 6 bay NAS as primary storage.
Asustor 2 bay NAS as rsync backup of QNAP
8 port gigabit Ethernet switch (soon to be upgraded to 2.5G)
Been working in IT for ~15 years now and this is the accumulation of all the old tech that was getting recycled by the companies I have worked for. Only things I purchased were the 10Gig NICs for each server, the Rosewill Chassis from EBAY and the Microtik CRS309-1G-8S+. The power draw is a little high but it has allowed me to learn many things and progress in my career with the knowledge I gained. If anyone has questions about the setup please let me know.
1st: Pfsense server: 1U supermicro with an i7-4770K CPU, 32 Gigs of RAM and dual 10Gb NIC.
2nd: Proxmox Server: 1U Cisco server with dual CPU E5-2690 v3 and 256 Gigs of RAM
3rd: TrueNAS Server: 4U Supermicro server with i7-4770K, 32 Gigs of RAM and ~70TB of storage
4th: Media Server: 4U Rosewill Chassis, with an i7-4770K, 32 Gigs of RAM and ~40TB of storage
5th: Synology RS2416RP+ with an INTEL Atom C2538 and 6Gigs of RAM and ~30TB of storage
I don't have much of a home lab at this current time. I'm new to the IT world and currently a student with the Microsoft Software and Systems Academy (MSSA). I currently am running Hyper-V on an old ASUS ROG laptop and developing skills using Azure. Thanks for what you're doing for the community!
It's exciting to see everyone's impressive home lab setups for self-hosting! I'm just getting started with self-hosting myself after being inspired by various YouTube videos. Right now, I'm running 5-6 Docker containers on my Raspberry Pi 4B 4Gb Model. Being a student, I can't afford to invest in more hardware at the moment. Winning the Beelink SEi14 Mini PC would be a game-changer for me! It would not only allow me to expand my home lab but also significantly boost my knowledge of self-hosting and Linux administration. Thank you for considering me for the giveaway, and Brandon, keep up the fantastic work educating enthusiasts like me!
@cjchico VERY nice setup! Love the cable management, very clean looking. Are you planning on maintaining the enterprise gear for the long haul, or moving to smaller setup in the future? Curious what most's plans are on this front. I have found myself coming full circle.
Been a viewer for a while now, I love this motivation to pop into the forums! This is the best contest, I get to talk about my Homelab, see other's setups, AND get a chance to win hardware!? Heck yeah!
My Homelab is all over the place, but the main purpose of it all is to manage my smarthome and then it grew from there. Recently added a media server (docker) and a home theater PC (i3 10100 @ 3.6GHz, 8gb RAM, GTX 1060 6GB) that can stream games from my main desktop and run a local LLM using Ollama in it's downtime.
In my ✨very fancy✨ server rack, I have:
Dell R620 1U server running Proxmox: 2x 12 core Xeon E5-2667 @ 2.90GHz, and 256GB RAM - a server I rescued from work.
Custom built 12 bay Unraid box for storage and backup using old hardware: an old AMD Phenom™ II X6 1035T @ 2.6GHz, 12GB RAM, and 30TB usable storage across 12 3TB drives (drives also rescued from work).
A currently unused Dell PowerConnect 5224 Switch, as it is too noisy in my current configuration.
Not pictured is an 8-port Netgear gigabit switch, and an APC UPS.
For the base of my network I am running pfSense on a ZimaBoard, and using a Raspberry Pi 2B for PiHole (used to host other things too) and some UniFi U7 Pro APs (purchased with the hope of faster network in the future). Redundant PiHole setup (1 pi, 1 docker) for Ad-Blocking and Local DNS resolution, pfSense is handling DHCP, and reverse DNS proxy via NGINX Proxy Manager.
With all of that, these are (most of) the services I'm running. A few are bare metal, a handful are VMs, but most are running via docker. My current project is better network segmentation with VLANs via pfSense.
And lastly, I have to show off my custom built smart home gadgets.
Multi-sensor smart switch featuring: 2 buttons with 4 functions each, motion sensor, temperature/humidity sensor, light sensor, and status LED.
3D Printed Button box with two LED buttons, currently used for signaling virtual switches to turn off reminders.
3D Printed motion sensor enclosure made from a few other models smashed together.
3D Printed backlight for the kettle that turns on when in use: facilitated by an energy sensing smart plug flashed with ESPHome, and ESP32 running ESPresense (bluetooth room tracking for automations) that allows the addition of LEDs.
Thank you as always for the awesome content you produce and thanks for opportunity to nerd out about my homelab setup and get to see all the awesome things others are doing.
