@dn10 very cool! Don't worry about getting into home labbing in a small way at first. This is the way that most of us started to be honest. Besides upgrading your UnRAID, what other plans do you have coming soon? Great to see your setup and thank you for sharing!
My short-term plan is to upgrade the Dell Wyse and set it up as a high-availability cluster, possibly adding a Coral Edge for Frigate. I’m also considering a GPU upgrade (3060 12GB or 4060 Ti 16GB) on the on-demand server for Local LLM tasks and Stable Diffusion.
In the long run, I aim to rack-mount the setup, integrate a UDM, and expand storage with a dedicated media server.
@sander Yes, I'm setting up Wake-on-LAN (WoL) with Home Assistant and slowly automating it through n8n based on different use cases as I go. I'm still new to this; it’s been a learning process with plenty of mistakes along the way.
'Best of the rest' regarding virtualization topics. Keep growing you excellent channel!
My home lab was started as an experiment, cos I am not an IT professional rather enthusiast. Now, even thou it is still at home (since its name is home lab ) I am hosting several VMs and containers that I use for my work. I am connecting from my office via Wireguard to my home and till now I am pretty much happy with this setup. Here are my gears:
1. ISP router 1000 mbps (the white one). The router is bridged to my...
2. Mikrotik hAP ac^3, which serves as Wireguard and DHCP server for my LAN.
3. HP Z4 G4 Workstation, main hypervisor (Proxmox): Intel Xeon W-2123 CPU @ 3.60GHz, 32GB ECC RAM (Absolutely amazing! NVIDIA Passthrough works flawless, following the wiki article on Proxmox web site)
4. Recently I bought one Dell OptiPlex 7020 MFF Plus, Intel Core i7-14700 vPro (33MB cache, 20 cores), 64GB DDR5 as a test hypervisor. I would like to migrate to mini PC but will see hoe it goes. For now this Dell OptiPlex becomes quite hot even when idle.
5. An old Lenovo PC, 2 x Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU J1800 @ 2.41GHz, 4GB DDR3 running Proxmox Backup Server in the same premise for doing hourly backups
6. An old PC, 4 x Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4440 CPU @ 3.10GHz, 16GB DDR3 running in my office (remote location) as a second off-site Proxmox Backup Server. One small SSD for the operating system and two spinning disk in ZFS RAID1 for datastore.
7. APC Power supply unit
8. 55" SONY TV 4K as a TV set and monitor.
Sometimes, I leave my laptop at the office and when I am back at home I don't have a free PC to access the web interface. That's why on the spare hypervisor (Dell OptiPlex) I have installed on top of proxmox: weston, firefox and remmina to have a basic GUI for accessing the web interface of my server.
@valentinmanev very nice setup! I like the multiple locations as well and how you have your backups housed offsite in a different location. What do you do for work if you mind me asking that allows you to take advantage of your home lab? Very cool.
@brandon-lee I am doing accounting and financial advisory services for private clients. They all have an account and login remotely to upload documents and to use our erp system
@valentinmanev Nice so cool! So you are using your home lab for your business if I am understanding that correctly? If so, great to see you getting a return on your investment and I think home labs in general give ones that, even if it is an intangible return in the form of knowledge.
@brandon-lee, technically, far in the past (and sometimes even now) small businesses have started from somebody’s home and if you can use your acquired knowledge, skills and assets for starting a new business it will be great.
My very in progress homelab. The shelving is a temporary rack alternative until I can get a propper rack with a ups in the garage.
N100 mini pc running bare metal pFsense
Synology DS920+ that is currently running:
VM:
Home assistant
Proxmox backup server
Docker:
Mosquitto
Zigbee2mqtt
Portainer
Plex
Bookstack
WikiJS
Uptime-kuma
Wallos
MariaDB
MS-01 i5 running proxmox:
LXC debian for tailscale
Node red
Mosquitto
Test enviroment:
Debian desktop
OPNsense
LXC debian running Xen Orchestra community edition
3 x XCP-NG VMs with XOSTORE
The proxmox node is a new addition and im gonna slowly move everything running on the NAS to PVE with proper backups to the NAS and cloud backup for the important data. At som point im gonna add inn at least one more PVE node to get a cluster going.
I'm on my second year of a higher professional degree in IT Operations and Security(non-english degree so translation might be wrong). Due to vmware licensing changes we just had to switch out our ESXi cluster to XCP-NP in the middle of our cources.
To get some practical experience with more hypervisors i decided on going with proxmox at home and have a virtulized xcp-ng cluster for testing in addition to our cource cluster.
Having lots of fun and getting a lot of experience with running my own lab. Would be sweet to add another node so I could get some high availability going with PVE. Homelabbing is addicting
