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Home lab beginners guide (2021)

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Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#131

Post by tomc1985 »

loudthing wrote: post #77

I've never understood why fiddling with IT equipment in your home is considering a "home lab" since you aren't necessarily creating anything (like a laboratory would do), you are just integrating together other people's industrial components to serve non business purposes. The most egregious factor of this hobby is that you are often buying equipment that costs enterprise prices with your own money, whether or not it…

Used this shit is crazy cheap. I picked up a 16-core Xeon monster with hyperthreading and 128gb of RAM for under a grand, and the power bill for it is maybe $20 a month

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#132

Post by Daegalus »

See, I have no interest in running large server hardware at home. I did it different.

At first i Had a stack of 2-3 old laptops running stuff. Now I just use 4 raspberry pi 4s, with 8gb. It lives in a cubby in my office desk. Low energy, low maintenance and works really well. Got rid of the laptops.

My network is the TPLink Omada stuff, sittign on some shelves in our family room. Everythign is wifi and I run a 2nd ap on the opposite side of the house using MoCA 2.5 to connect them over the coax in the 2 rooms to improve performance.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#133

Post by cagataygurturk »

I have 3-node vSphere cluster with 36 cores, 300 GB of RAM, bunch of different disk options (magnetic, SSD, NVMe)

It is all powered by Ubiquiti networking gear.

VMware VUG is providing free and legal VMware licenses. I get to run VSAN, on top of it I deploy Kubernetes and I can decide if my pod wants to use poor performance VSAN disks (like EBS on AWS) or faster local NVMe‘s.

These are just couple of things I can make at home. Everything started as an experiment and it started to look like a replica of what we can have in a datacenter, but without a SLA.

First of all, all these stuff is extremely fun for me. Secondly, I won‘t go into details but as a cloud consultant, this thing I started as a hobby became one of the big boosters of my career. I never expected such an effect but I am extremely impressed by this.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#136

Post by bigiain »

nomel wrote: post #9
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…

> Consumer hardware is insane. With less technical management, I've had repeated, and bewildered, conversations trying to get them to understand that our one "computer" sitting on my desk is many many times faster than the "server" our IT team provides. "But it's a server!".

I like to point out to people who haven’t worked it out for themselves, that the load balanced HA pair of EC2 instances with the multi AZ RDS that runs almost $200 a month at on demand rates, is somewhat less computing power and storage that the phone in my pocket.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#137

Post by bigiain »

BackBlast wrote: post #109
7speter wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> “no ecc memory” or the like ECC is about long term stability and data integrity. For a router, meh, the network protocols will deal with any flips. For a file server or database it's better if those random bit flips don't happen to critical data. AMD based systems can sometimes be forced to use ECC mode even if the BOIS doesn't support it. ECC is more important in systems with very large ram footprints because ther…

One argument I’ve heard, which seems valid enough, is that running a homelab setup without EEC memory is a good thing, because you then need to build stuff that can handle memory errors (or at least notice and learn from them) which you will occasionally see in your half a dozen or so homelab machines. Once your deploying production work systems “at scale” with hundreds (or thousands) of servers, you will be guaranteed to see occasional memory errors (probably even with ECC).

One of my first real homelab setups, was 6 raspberry pi’s, laid out as two load balancer, two web app servers, and two database servers. The “unreliability” of pi’s running everything off SD cards was a _feature_ because it gave me lots of experience in how my (work) software stack running on our typical AWS design held up in face of failures.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#138

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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…

Mines an old laptop and a new NAS.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#139

Post by skippyboxedhero »

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…

The Deskmini x300 is good. Takes everything from 2400g up to 4750g (or whatever it is). 2x nvme ssd and can fit 2x 2.5 drives. You can also buy barebones for ~$150 (everything but storage, RAM, and CPU).

Had x300 for quite a few years but have started playing games again, so decided to trade in for a desktop...but will probably go back if RDNA 2 is good/x300 gets updated for it (imo, the iGPU on the 4750g is terrible...RDNA 2 is way better). Great for running VMs on though, can take a Noctua NH-L9 so is quiet, far less space-intensive.

Re: Home lab beginners guide (2021)

#140

Post by MrFoof »

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.

HP ProDesk 405 G8 Mini, or HP EliteDesk 805 G8 Mini.

The ProDesk 405 G8 can take a 35W RYZEN 7 PRO 5750GE. This includes AMD DASH (IPMI), and the Ryzen Pro has a few extra security features from EPYC/Threadripper. I got mine shipped for just $665 including tax, and did the SSD (1TB 980 Pro) and memory (64GB DDR4-3200 CL16) myself for another $300ish.

If you get three of them, you can have a pretty fantastic Spark cluster that consumes only about 100-120W! But yes, they do XCP-NG or Proxmox clusters extremely well.

The EliteDesk 805 G8 can have the 65W Ryzen 7 PRO 5750G, has a copper heatsink (instead of aluminum), has a 2nd NVMe slot, and can be shipped with a 2.5GbE port (you can order the part for the ProDesk 405 G8). Though if you get the 35W 5750GE, you can have an NVIDIA GeForce 1660Ti 6GB installed as well.

Since both use Ryzen PRO processors, they actually support ECC memory as well. I'd argue they may be the best overall 1L form factor systems on the market, especially in terms of performance per watt. The only other thing I'd ever want is 10GbE instead of 2.5GbE -- though in the EliteDesk 805, you COULD get an NVMe to 10GbE Ethernet and install it, just need to make a faceplate to properly mount the port on the back of the chassis.

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