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Home Lab Beginners guide

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Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#241

Post by isopede »

I have a rather extensive homelab, painstakingly set up over time. It works great, I love it. Few questions for you guys:

- My real problem is disaster recovery. It would take me forever to replicate everything, if I could even remember it all. Router configurations, switch configurations, NAS, all the various docker containers scattered across different vlans, etc. I mapped out my network early on but failed to keep it up to date over time. Is there a good tool to draw, document, and keep up-to-date diagrams of my infra?

- Backup and upgrading is also a persistent problem for me. I will often set up a container, come back to it 6 months later, and have no idea what I did. I have dozens of containers scattered across different machines (NUCs, NAS, desktops, servers, etc). Every container service feels like it has its own convention for where the bind mounts need to go, what user it should be run as, what permissions etc it needs. I can't keep track of it all in my head, especially after the fact. I just want to be able to hit backup, restore, and upgrade on some centralized interface. It makes me miss the old cattle days with VM clone/snapshot. I still have a few VMs running on a proxmox machine that is sort of close, but nothing like that for the entire home lab.

I really want to get to a point, or at least move towards a solution where I could in theory, torch my house and do a full disaster recovery restore of my entire setup.

There has to be something simpler than going full kubernetes to manage a home setup. What do you guys use?

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#242

Post by Andrex »

buybackoff wrote: post #25
smallmancontrov wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been thinking about upgrading my current "homelab" (just an old PC), and I've been waiting for a small form factor with an integrated power supply and a bunch of NVMe slots. Does that exist yet?

For my homelab, I bought OptiPlex 7000 with 3 NVMe slots (one PCIe 4.0, one 3.0, one 3.0 short 2242), 1 PCI x16, 1 PCI x4, 3 SATA and 3 DisplayPorts for 300 EUR near 2 years ago. It was so good actually that I've made it my main PC. I already had 3 monitors and this SFF just worked fine with them. No games of course. I also have Precision Tower with Xeon/64GB ECC RAM and 1 native NVMe slot. I use PCI-to-NVMe adapters…

OptiPlex seemed to be the best option when I was browsing around.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#243

Post by Andrex »

mech422 wrote: post #164
znpy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Intel NUCs are so *insanely* good for homelabbers. I got a few recently, and they're just great, particularly in terms of power usage. I hooked mine to tasmota-powered smart plugs, and they idle at something like 6W ... Granted, I always tune hardware (from bios config) and software (tuned profile) for low power... But long story short, my nucs rarely spike over 30W. Literally half of one of those old tungsten-based…

Personally, I thought the NUC style boxes were really expensive. I like odroid H2/H3 SBCs[0] - they have much less compute power, but support large memory (DDR4 up to 64G), SSD/NVME, dual on-board nics (up to 2.5Gbps), X86 based and just sip on power (2 watts idle, 15w stress, 18w cpu+gpu stress). 0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

I didn't know ODROID was in this market, that's awesome! Definitely checking them out next time I need hardware, the H3 looks perfect.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#244

Post by mindslight »

cybrox wrote: post #39
buybackoff wrote: post #10

The article is good, but it is intimidating buy its size and scope. A homelab could be a single NUC on a desk. I have one with 64GB RAM and it could fit so so many things. NUCs are very efficient to run 24/7, but become noisy with sustained CPU load. For that one could grow the setup with OptiPlex or Precision Tower (can haz ECC) SFF from eBay. These Dell SFFs are very good, quite small yet proper desktops/servers wi…

In addition to that, I don't think people should overthink the rack as an essential component. I like racks as much as the next guy and homelab racks look really cool but for usability and learning, just go with whatever you like. I personally have 4 boxes stacked in a corner that are connected to a "rack", which is just two rack side panels bolted to the back of a workbench that I screw components into, connected to…

From a home perspective, the best way to think about a (full depth four post) rack is as an extremely high density shelving for specific types of things. You won't make any gains with one or two machines, or several SBCs in small cases, that you couldn't have made with similar non-rack shelves. Having a few pieces of gear with rack ears not in a rack will forever call to you though. In general I'd either say commit to it (42U and understand you'll be paying a premium for shelves/gear/accessories), or regular shelving will suit you fine.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#245

Post by irusensei »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #121
irusensei wrote: post #54

I have two 4GB rockpro64 with the NAS case on my closet. Each with an SSD raid. There are no fans in this setup and the SBCs don’t take much space. No heat either. More than happy with these, good uptime too. Tow-boot gives me an UEFI environment so I can use some normal distros so I use the latest Fedora server.

Whats your raid setup with the ssds? I see 4tb ssd have marched down to $200. Would be nice to never hear spinning rust again.

BTRFS raid1 for now. I’ll try to push for raid10 maybe by the end of the year since SSDs draw very little power.

Device is finicky with sata adapters. I’m using some Marvell controllers at the moment.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#246

Post by blackfawn »

nvy wrote: post #231
blackfawn wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Power draw and often noise on enterprise equipment is ridiculous in a home setting. I try to stick to the small form factor (SFF) or ultra-small form factor (USFF) computers whenever I can, which is what the author is using. I used to use Raspberry Pi boards for some things but always ran into problems w/ microSD cards dying, even with log2ram and buying industrial cards. I haven't had a single issue after sw…

Which x64 machines have you been using? I'm looking for a successor to PC Engines APUs

I've been sticking w/ very compact units, mainly ThinkCentre M series "Tiny" and Dell OptiPlex "Micro" form factor, which are both practically identical in size. Both use a laptop power supply. You can get current versions for many hundreds of dollars or generation(s) old ones for as cheap as $30 USD. My most recent ones were older 3rd & 4th gen i5 & i7 CPUs but they still blow current Raspberry Pi, etc. out of the water, have M.2 for network, etc. & SATA for storage. A Dell I have that's a generation newer than these adds NVMe too. It's hard finding these small PCs that have multiple Ethernet but I just added a gigabit Ethernet M.2 card to the one.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#247

Post by Andrex »

haunter wrote: post #11

>For this article’s purpose, I won’t recommend any specific servers because this will vary a ton depending on what you will be hosting. NAS storage, VMs, web servers, backup servers, mail servers, ad blockers, and all the rest. For my requirements, I purchased a ThinkCentre M73 and ThinkCentre M715q; both used off eBay. This is the way. HP, Lenovo, and Dell are all making identical small form factor PCs that are more…

I've been pretty happy with the EliteDesk G3 I got off eBay a couple months ago. I actually use it for light work (mostly spreadsheets and emails) too.

I think I paid less than $130 including shipping and sometimes it (anecdotally) has better performance than my home PC which is a full tower I bought new 4-5 years back.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#248

Post by rlabrecque »

isopede wrote: post #241

I have a rather extensive homelab, painstakingly set up over time. It works great, I love it. Few questions for you guys: - My real problem is disaster recovery. It would take me forever to replicate everything, if I could even remember it all. Router configurations, switch configurations, NAS, all the various docker containers scattered across different vlans, etc. I mapped out my network early on but failed to keep…

I think the core problem you have is a lack of consistency. I'd try to trim down the number of different types of device/deployment methods/etc you have. It's too hard to scale wide as a single person or two, but you can go very deep in one stack and both know it very well and also get into a spot where it's kind of like either everything works or nothing works if it's all exactly the same, which means ultimately everything will have to work well.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#249

Post by eemil »

> For my home lab, I won’t be needing CAT8 or CAT7 anytime soon

Has anyone ever needed CAT7 (or better)? CAT6 works for 10 GBit at a short distance, but in my experience (in corporate IT) I've literally never seen a 10 GBit Ethernet port! SFPs are the shit, direct attach SFPs are cheap as chips and fiber ones aren't even that expensive anymore. And of course fiber will handily beat twisted pair in signal integrity at any distance.

Re: Home Lab Beginners guide

#250

Post by mech422 »

bombcar wrote: post #215
mech422 wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

THIS! My Dell and HP blade chassis/server EAT power (10+ Xeon blades). I actually shut them down and started moving to SBC based stuff like odriod H2/H3's. Basically silent and just sips power. All much less heat (I live in a desert, so thats important)! 0: https://ameridroid.com/products/odroid-h3

For what it's worth, we're just starting to get to where enterprise stuff that cares about power usage is coming off-lease. Some of the newest stuff actually sips power relatively when not under load. My biggest (current) problem is finding something that supports a ton of SATA drives and still is low power (though at some point even the power usage of spinning rust can become noticeable). I live in the icy wildernes…

yeah - I don't have a need for a lot of drives, but its hard to come by...but the odroids have a PCIE expansion slot, so you might be able to add a add-on controller...

Given how huge drives are now, 1 nvme and 1 sata/spinning rust is basically all I'd ever need (I don't do video/music/etc. )

Edit: Oh shit...just checked, it does NOT have a PCIE slot..I was sure it did :-(

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