My home lab upgrades this 2023

I actually just took some pictures the other day to show how bad the rear of mine looks as compared to the front

@malcolm-r that looks awesome. Don't worry about the back of the rack. Mine looks about the same. I change hardware and devices so frequently that it stays in a state of disarray, but that is the nature of home labs I think 🤣 🤣 🤣 also, I have those same Startech PDUs 👍

The A+ cable management of a beginner homelab. Currently living the hashtag vanlife in a travel trailer so space and power is limited. Currently my homelab resides on top my fridge, consisting of an HP Elitedesk G3 w/ i5-6600, 48GB RAM, 2x 128GB 2.5" SSD, 1x 512GB NVMe and 2x 4TB 3.5"HDD and a quad I225-V network card. Inseego FX2000 5G router in bridge mode for internet and a TP-Link Omada Wifi AP. 

The Elitedesk is running Proxmox with a PfSense VM, a TrueNAS Scale VM, a Debian KDE desktop VM, Home Assistant VM, Jellyfin and Cloudflared as CTs.

I have plans to outfit my fridgetop server room as a 3U rack and separate my workloads into Critical and Not-so-critical with two machines, one hosting PfSense and Home Assistant (Critical) and the second with the HDDs and horsepower to run the NAS and everything else that I don't mind shutting down if power is low. 

@life-from-scratch That is awesome! Even though space is limited, you truly have a mobile lab with the travel trailer. Very cool. Don't worry about cable management. That will come with time. All of us started small and with little cable management in the beginning. It's all about little upgrades here and there. Definitely awesome. Thanks for sharing!

So here is my homelab, keep in mind I'm still new to all of this in 2023. I do want to do much more but I have to start small.  However it's hardware I feel is pretty impressive for my first homelab

Intel NUC 12th Gen i7-1260p NUC12WSH7
2TB Western Digital SN850X NVMe
1TB Crucial MX500
64GB Corsair DDR4 Memory

Raspberry Pi 4th gen 8GB Model
Had to get the NESPi Case for the Nostalgia

While this is not homelab related I thought I would show off my gaming PC that I built in late 2021 (I hadn't built a new PC in 10 years so I may have gone a bit overboard especially on the RGB and water-cooling)

Hardware Details:

Monitor: 49" Samsung UltraWide Screen G9 Odyssey Gaming Monitor (240Hz)
CPU: Intel i7-11700K
Memory: 32GB DDR4
Case: Corsair 5000D Airflow Tempered Glass
GPU: NVidia GeForce RTX3080 Ti Founder's Edition
Watercooling: Corsair AIO Watercooling
Storage: 1TB Samsung 980 Pro NVMe
Storage: 2TB Samsung 870 EVO SSD
Keyboard: Steelseries APEX Pro Gaming Keyboard
Mouse: Razer Basilisk Ultimate Optical with Hyperspeed Technology and Charging Dock.

**If chosen I will use the additional miniPC to expand my current lab to take advantage of testing vSAN and other clustering technologies.

One thing I want to add to this post is join the discord community if  you have not already there is a great group of like minded users and anytime I have had questions I have always gotten a response and the owner of all this is extremely approachable and open to suggestions to help the community grow.

Thanks,

Ghaleon

@life-from-scratch dude, your van-homelab-life setup is great! you can make some pretty powerful clusters with mini/micro PCs.

@ghaleon That is an awesome gaming machine! Congrats on the build...that looks nice. Also, yes you are starting out with some great hardware there with your home lab as well. Thank you for posting your lab setup, pics, and specs!

guess i should post my specs. from top to bottom:

Mikrotik CRS317-1G-16S+

Mikrotik CSS326-24G-2S+

Custom 1U Plex Server: i3-10105 (w/ Quicksync), 32GB RAM, 256GB NVMe, 500TB SATA

KVM

Custom 3U - ESXi/NAS - Chenbro RM31616, Xeon E5-2680v4 14c/28t, 128GB ECC, 10x 14TB, 4x 6TB SAS, 2x 2TB NVMe, Optane, bunch of 10g/1g networking

Huawei 2U RH2288H V3 - ESXi - 2x Xeon E5-2660v3 20c/40t total, 256GB ECC, 6x 1TB SATA, 3x 2TB NVMe, Optane, bunch of 10g/1g networking

Cyberpower PR2200LCDRT2U UPS (2170VA / 1600W)

Average power for the rack is about 600W. I'm just glad my utility rate is relatively cheap per kWh.

@malcolm-r awesome specs. Hey which Optane are you running? I was able to get my hands on some Optane drives through the vExpert program and have been running those in my supermicros as a Cache tier in vSAN...getting over 100,000 IOPs on my old servers lol

@brandon-lee i snagged a bunch of the 58GB M.2 drives from Newegg here: https://www.newegg.com/intel-optane-ssd-p1600x-58gb/p/N82E16820167488

@malcolm-r I can't believe how much Optane has come down. Shame that Intel is killing it, but definitely leading to killer prices now. I remember when Optane was thousands of dollars for minimal space, but man, how times have changed.

My home lab is a bit scattered so I had to turn some parts into a collage.

Top: "Main Cluster" - 5-node ProxMox setup running nearly all house services. Has capacity for experiments but each node can run everything by itself if I need to go into low-power mode. The Synology NAS next to these nodes provides NFS shared storage for the nodes and is isolated from the house data.

Middle: "Sandbox" - 5-node ProxMox cluster running a number of VMs to support Kubernetes experiments. It's a work in progress, 5 litres of tiny-mini-micro power. Each node has a short link to the dedicated switch. Video goes through an HDMI switch for easy node selection. Power goes through a Kasa 6-in-1 power switch with energy monitoring so that I can cycle nodes remotely and watch/log power usage. 

Bottom: "OG NAS" - First built in 2014, this system is an absolute trooper. 4x 6TB HDDs and dual NICs, this is the primary copy of house data. 

"New NAS" - Also a work in progress, this is aiming to replace the aging OG-NAS. 5x 6TB HDDs, 64GB RAM, i7-4590K and a pair of 16TB drives for snapshots and additional copies. This is a ProxMox server running TrueNAS in a VM (HBA for drives passed through). It hosts NFS and SMB shares for the house data and other various projects that haven't been migrated off the OG-NAS. 

Total Idle power draw of everything pictured is about 300W. 

@t3hbeowulf that is great! You may quite possibly win the aware for the most nodes in the home lab! Thats great that you have a main cluster and a sandbox cluster for testing. I need to carve out more of a dedicated testing environment myself. Hey just curious, what are your specs for the Proxmox nodes? Are those Dell mini's?

Heh, I blame the Raspberry Pi shortage, really digging into ProxMox and eBay for starting that trend this year. 

The main cluster is a mix of Dell, Lenovo and HP tiny/mini/micro nodes. (One Dell is on my bench for service so only 4 are pictured today) The Dells and Lenovo are Core i7-8700 (6c 12t) processors, the HP nodes are AMD Ryzen 5 3400G (4c 8t) and all have 32GB of RAM, 512GB NVMe storage and a 1TB SATA SSD for shared storage. (Sync'd ZFS pool in ProxMox)

The sandbox cluster was my "oops" cluster. I sent a low offer to a seller with a Lot of 5 thinking there was no way they'd accept, and they did. I then asked my wife for forgiveness. 🙃 They are a homogenous collection of Dell Optiplex 7050s with a Core i5-6500T, 256GB NVMe storage and 32GB RAM each. In almost every case, I took advantage of the default build config where Dell likes to stuff a single stick of memory. I was able to pick up matching pairs to get 32GB without having many sticks left over.