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Home lab beginners guide (2021)

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Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#111

Post by moondev »

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.

vSphere (ESXi + vCenter) is much more enjoyable to use than proxmox in my experience. Compare the UI below but you really notice it when using it.

https://i0.wp.com/williamlam.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/...

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E5sm0cjXoAIfLM9?format=png&name=...

Here are some other reasons:

* Best support for PCIe passthrough, easily toggle PCIe devices from UI without reboot.

* Best networking with virtual distrubuted switches - more intuitive to manage and use

* vSAN integration with k8s for block volumes is great, including volume snapshots. Also supports RWX (nfs) volumes

* vSphere api is a first class citizen with cloud native tooling such as terraform, ansible and packer. It also has a great golang-based cli via govc.

With all that said I actually still experiment with kvm (kubevirt, harvester etc) by running it nested inside esxi which works exactly how you would expect. Much prefer vSphere as the base of my lab though.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#112

Post by scarface74 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #24
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…

> running a homelab is a nonsensical Depends, I get a lot of utility from mine, as it manages my media collection for streaming at home and on the go. I've tried using SaaS alternatives and managed hosting of the apps I run, but those experiences were both lackluster and relatively expensive. And since the apps I run and my media collection aren't locked behind proprietary systems or limited APIs that might disappear…

That’s not a “HomeLab”. You can create a Plex Media server with a $249 Nvidia Shield and some low cost USB hard drives.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#113

Post by scarface74 »

noitpmeder wrote: post #103
KennyBlanken wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A media server is not a "homelab." One of the most irritating things about "homelabs" is that most people seem to think a "homelab" means "a rack of very expensive, way-overspec'd ubiquiti gear, an OTS NAS unit, and a docker container server running media server/torrent shit." I have a laptop running a dozen different containers - bookstack, torrent client, rss reader, and so on. I don't think of it as a "homelab."

Why are you trying to gatekeep what is or is not a homelab. Just because it isn't sufficiently complex doesn't mean it doesn't fit the definition.

A home lab was generally seen as something to experiment with and learn something from. Setting up a Plex server is literally installing one piece of software on anything newer than a Core 2 Duo.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#114

Post by scarface74 »

alsetmusic wrote: post #13
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…

> running a homelab is a nonsensical I think a lot of people build a homelab to learn about technologies and get realworld experience deploying them. That was what drove mine for a couple of years. Once you’ve mastered servers and networking and so on, then it just becomes a fun hobby, I agree there. But someone who wants to get into networking and the like (and who lacks experience) is definitely going to need to pr…

Deploying servers and networking is a lot more fun when you can just sit down to Visual Studio Code and write some HCL or Yaml…

And yes I was around before the “cloud” was a thing. I first networked a Mac LC II and PowerMac 6100/60 to play with a Gopher server.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#115

Post by runjake »

eminence32 wrote: post #67
runjake wrote: post #63

I manage a network of a few hundred multi-layer switches, several routers, and a couple thousand wireless access points across a couple dozen campuses. My home network is an Eero. The network engineer’s kids have no homelab, as it were. Occasionally, I get the urge to build out a proper homelab but quickly realize I don’t want to come home and deal with the same stuff and put the Eero back in. It’s not that I don’t l…

I like your observation. I think the flip side applies in some cases too: the people who don't get to run fancy network gear at part of $dayjob get some enjoyment running them for fun at home.

And indeed that’s how I got started, temporarily borrowing hardware from my workplace and cobbling it together in my cramped apartment: beige Cisco routers, switches and hubs, sun3 and sun4 hardware, a microVAX II, etc etc.

I luckily had a mentor that let me bend the rules and bring stuff home. If you are a mentor you should also bend the rules for noobs.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#116

Post by BackBlast »

MrFoof wrote: post #29
candiddevmike wrote: post #22

Just get a 12 core+ Ryzen and a bunch of RAM (64GB+). It'll be more efficient/faster GHz than a bunch of old servers and more than capable for running three node clusters.

Honestly, depending on what you're doing? Not even that. * Don't underestimate the number of services you can having running in containers on a Raspberry Pi 4B with 8GB of RAM, sipping just 2.1W (yes, that little!) at idle over PoE or as low as 1.35W over WiFi powered by USB-C. With distributions like DietPi you can have a mere 10 processes at startup (using just 44MiB of RAM) , but still all the flexibility in the w…

> * Don't underestimate the number of services you can having running in containers on a Raspberry Pi 4B with 8GB of RAM, sipping just 2.1W (yes, that little!) at idle over PoE or as low as 1.35W over WiFi powered by USB-C. With distributions like DietPi you can have a mere 10 processes at startup (using just 44MiB of RAM), but still all the flexibility in the world.

I've been disappointed in the general reliability, terrible IO, and heat/power of the RPI4. I'm getting rid of them in favor of second hand thin clients.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#117

Post by Karrot_Kream »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #61
heavyset_go wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> running a homelab is a nonsensical Depends, I get a lot of utility from mine, as it manages my media collection for streaming at home and on the go. I've tried using SaaS alternatives and managed hosting of the apps I run, but those experiences were both lackluster and relatively expensive. And since the apps I run and my media collection aren't locked behind proprietary systems or limited APIs that might disappear…

A media server is not a "homelab." One of the most irritating things about "homelabs" is that most people seem to think a "homelab" means "a rack of very expensive, way-overspec'd ubiquiti gear, an OTS NAS unit, and a docker container server running media server/torrent shit." I have a laptop running a dozen different containers - bookstack, torrent client, rss reader, and so on. I don't think of it as a "homelab."

You're mistaking the consumerist urges that a lot of people partake in their hobbies and the idea of a homelab itself. A homelab can be overspec'd ubiquiti gear or it could be a RasPi running a bunch of services. It's just one or more servers that sit on your home network that you can fuck around with. Yeah, I guess something you care for stability with doesn't necessarily constitute the "lab" distinction, but a lot of times these stable things come out of experimenting in a homelab.

My "media server" (browser and downloaded media played via smplayer on a stock Ubuntu install) emerged from an experimental server running a lightweight distro that I used to do anything and everything from. Once I found that which parts of the media usecase fit into my partner and my lifestyle, it graduated to a stable decently-specced Ubuntu machine that is rarely touched other than for updates and downloading new content.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#118

Post by BackBlast »

kernelbugs wrote: post #110
MrFoof wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, depending on what you're doing? Not even that. * Don't underestimate the number of services you can having running in containers on a Raspberry Pi 4B with 8GB of RAM, sipping just 2.1W (yes, that little!) at idle over PoE or as low as 1.35W over WiFi powered by USB-C. With distributions like DietPi you can have a mere 10 processes at startup (using just 44MiB of RAM) , but still all the flexibility in the w…

> 1L Zen 3 Ryzen 7 PRO APU What computer is this, if you don't mind sharing? Sounds great for getting 1 or 2 and hosting a lot of VMs.

Look at the TMM series at servethehome.com. They go over vendors, models, specs of the 1L segment as well as the new/used market for them.

It's generally a really good form factor for a small server. The only things most people sometimes wish they had in them is 2.5-10GBE instead of the stock 1GB, and formal ECC support.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#119

Post by Karrot_Kream »

loudthing wrote: post #95
noitpmeder wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound worked up. Most people who seriously invest like fiddling around and creating their own networking structure. It's a feature that they don't have to worry about "serving business needs"! I'm not sure what the difference is between this and any other moderately expensive hobby.

It's the phrase "homelab", I suppose. Why not call it "Home IT" or "Home Data Center" or "Home Network Infrastructure". Calling it a home laboratory sounds like enthusiasts are trying to escape some preconceived notions about the topic. I digress...

You can actually do some crazy things with a homelab. I have a store-and-forward network joining roadwarrior machines to machines on my home network organized in a hub-spoke-ish model. It lets me access media from my home network even when I'm on some super oversubscribed AP (at 256 KB/s) at some crappy hotel with awful firewall rules (like only letting TCP traffic on 80 and 443 out) without opening any security holes on the network itself. I was able to experiment and deploy the network using the machines in my homelab.

As far as the name, I think it comes from the term "networking lab" that netops actually use to trial out network topologies before deploying them in the field. It's a home networking lab, that's all.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#120

Post by Karrot_Kream »

nullwarp wrote: post #105
runjake wrote: post #63

I manage a network of a few hundred multi-layer switches, several routers, and a couple thousand wireless access points across a couple dozen campuses. My home network is an Eero. The network engineer’s kids have no homelab, as it were. Occasionally, I get the urge to build out a proper homelab but quickly realize I don’t want to come home and deal with the same stuff and put the Eero back in. It’s not that I don’t l…

I never spent much time with networking so a lot of it was a bit of a mystery to me so I spent the COVID time building out really awesome but overly built network. I learned a ton and can now actually understand what's going on under the hood! Since then though I definitely have simplified it a lot because it was a lot to manage but it was an excellent learning experience. This is my long winded way of saying, networ…

Best part is debugging networking stuff is always really hard. Opening up a packet dump can help in some cases, but when you're trying to figure out why your nftables rule isn't registering a connection in the kernel connection table, you have to do some fun stuff to figure it out.
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