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Home lab beginners guide (2021)

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Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#51

Post by MrFoof »

candiddevmike wrote: post #30
sgt wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what cost though?

$500-800 for the CPU and RAM ish? I just built a 16 core Ryzen with 32GB of RAM and a bunch of HDDs for about that a year ago.

Pretty much spot on, though the ceiling is a lot lower, at least in the US.

-- -----

A 12-core Ryzen 9 5900X is now $395 everywhere in the US, though a patient soul can get one on new eBay for $370-375 before sales tax (but including shipping), best $350 used.

DDR4-3200 CL16 from top brands isr $3.50-$3.65/GB new, or under $250 for 64GB. Again, a patient soul can save more still and get it closer to $200. Want 32GB? Cut those prices in half.

So ~$530-650 new with sales tax and shipping, with a floor of maybe $455-575. For a tremendously capable processor and 32-64GB of memory.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#52

Post by noizejoy »

bagrow wrote: post #3

Anyone else annoyed at how narrow the term Homelab really is relative to what it could be? Any scientific or maker hobbies could take place in a "home lab," from breeding seedlings, to soldering and electronics work, to 3D printing. But it really means just networking and servers? Seems too narrow to me.

I often wish, that this kind of thing would be called something more like homedatacenter

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#53

Post by ocdtrekkie »

candiddevmike wrote: post #33
moondev wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went the "prosumer" route too. Threadripper maxed with 256G memory. It runs esxi that auto boots my "workstation" vm on startup. This vm has my GPU, nvme, and usb passthru. This way I can boot my workstation "on metal" if needed, but the vm works great. I then manage my lab infra running on the same machine via vCenter html5 ui.

Why ESXi just out of curiousity? Seems like most businesses I work with are ripping it out (some with glee) and going acropolis/kubevirt/QEMU or cloud.

For really modern stuff sure, but a lot of enterprises are not using containers, they're still Hyper-V or VMware based. The only reason to go Hyper-V is because it's cheaper, so if you can use ESXi free... you choose ESXi.

ESXi remains one of the most ridiculously and stupidly stable platforms of all time. Someday someone will find an ESXi host with a twenty year uptime. Not because you should, but because it can.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#54

Post by drewzero1 »

genewitch wrote: post #10
mcovalt wrote: post #6

This is fun. I'm more of a minimalist with my homelab setup. It's a laptop and an old NAS. I love it either way: running a homelab is a nonsensical and fun hobby in any case. I feel like we live in a world in which it's either racks or cheap VPSs. In reality, at home, we have some serious CPU horsepower just spinning billions of empty cycles per second. Consumer hardware is insane . I've handled 10's of thousands of…

looks better than my quick and dirty wireguard setup to get NAT Type: A behind CGNAT on game consoles - Basically put whatever is connected to a device in a "public DMZ", separate from your network: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genewitch/opensource/maste... Wireguard is both very frustrating and very cool. I'm currently using it similarly to give a VM a public IP, and i'm testing the details on getting multiple…

I recently bought an old HP server thinking it would be fun to play with. It turned out that it was loud and power-hungry, and for most things my needs could be served just as well by an old laptop. I ended up giving the server to a friend (who has their electric bill included in their rent).

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#55

Post by morganherlocker »

bagrow wrote: post #3

Anyone else annoyed at how narrow the term Homelab really is relative to what it could be? Any scientific or maker hobbies could take place in a "home lab," from breeding seedlings, to soldering and electronics work, to 3D printing. But it really means just networking and servers? Seems too narrow to me.

My personal homelab (a stack of old laptops connected to a network switch) is mostly built around various experimental antenna arrays used for rtl-sdr hobbies (aircraft and maritime telemetry collection mostly) + home automation over a zwave mesh network. The home automation ecosystem also has a lot overlap with automated gardening/growing, since automated sensing and irrigation are a great use case for tools like home assistant.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#56

Post by zargon »

neilv wrote: post #44
sgt wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just had a PFC capable APC UPS fail on me. Not that it necessarily means anything. UPS's do fail, that's all.

The two APC SMX1500RM2U rackmount units that I had at home seemed built very well. (Currently have two Cyberpower rackmount units, which don't need as much rack depth in my living room, but I kinda expect something industrial-sounding like AMERICAN POWER CONVERSION to be more reliable than cheesy-sounding CYBERpower. :)

I used to swear by APC but they have really gone down hill in the last decade. The first rule of a UPS should be, don't burn down the house. So when buying a new unit this year I went with the brand whose consumer PFC-compatible model didn't have several reviews about it catching fire: Cyberpower.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#57

Post by Elv13 »

powersnail wrote: post #28

As someone who has never done this before, what's the benefit of setting up a server rack, compared with just using my desktop? Is it purely for the fun of tinkering with hardware? Is there something that's not doable on a desktop?

A PC is ideal as long as there is only one. Once you start adding machines, it is time to move to a rack. Otherwise you end up with a giant ball of wires. Racks have rails like drawers, so the units are easy to service. Thats not the case with a heap of ATX towers. Also, your "collection" remains self contained and doesn't grow. Past some scale, you start to also make use of other rack mountable accessories like UPSes, PDUs, patch panels and switches. In the past, you had to move pretty early because older consumer machines like Pentium4 could only do so much, so you needed many of them even for a basic setup like a LAMP server or render/compile cluster.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#58

Post by smackeyacky »

7speter wrote: post #21
genewitch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks better than my quick and dirty wireguard setup to get NAT Type: A behind CGNAT on game consoles - Basically put whatever is connected to a device in a "public DMZ", separate from your network: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genewitch/opensource/maste... Wireguard is both very frustrating and very cool. I'm currently using it similarly to give a VM a public IP, and i'm testing the details on getting multiple…

> Speaking of "CPU horsepower" i just replaced a 1.5kW HP[0] server with a .2kW Ryzen 5950x "server" that is about 5% faster overall - don't forget that old stuff, while capable, adds to the electric bill, usually at a constant rate. What I’ve observed is people on subs like r/homelab and r/sysadmin ridicule people who appreciate the available horsepower with modern consumer tech because “no ecc memory” or the like a…

Enterprise servers make no sense at home, but they are more fun to play with than old laptops. It's a hobby. After a while you appreciate buying good tools rather than making do, like any other hobby.

Old HPE servers have jumped in price though. Last year you could buy insanely powerful stuff for under $200 but it's all $400 and up for the same gear at the moment.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#59

Post by genewitch »

7speter wrote: post #21
genewitch wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

looks better than my quick and dirty wireguard setup to get NAT Type: A behind CGNAT on game consoles - Basically put whatever is connected to a device in a "public DMZ", separate from your network: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/genewitch/opensource/maste... Wireguard is both very frustrating and very cool. I'm currently using it similarly to give a VM a public IP, and i'm testing the details on getting multiple…

> Speaking of "CPU horsepower" i just replaced a 1.5kW HP[0] server with a .2kW Ryzen 5950x "server" that is about 5% faster overall - don't forget that old stuff, while capable, adds to the electric bill, usually at a constant rate. What I’ve observed is people on subs like r/homelab and r/sysadmin ridicule people who appreciate the available horsepower with modern consumer tech because “no ecc memory” or the like a…

I was running Wok + Kimchi + gingerbase on the HP, i'm now using proxmox instead. Short of having lights out management (out of band) built in, i haven't noticed much difference between the platforms being "a server" and "a desktop"; make no mistake, 5950x is a monster chip, but it's still a desktop with two few PCIe lanes for me to consider it "a server" - luckily i only require enough PCIe to have an old GPU and extra SATA ports. If i was building out stuff to do more research i'd want more pcie lanes than the Ryzen Desktop supports.
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