Thought I would just share my little home lab setup. I have Ubiquiti running my network with 1GB Up/Down. I have a Dell Poweredge T440 server with 2x Intel Gold CPUs (40 cores) and 128GB or RAM with 4TB SSD Storage.

I run ESXi 8 as a hypervisor and then have a variety of Virtual Machines running, such as, a VM for Komodo (https://komo.do) to manage all my docker containers. Dockers running things like PingVin, Uptime Kuma, Homarr, paperless-ngx and more.

I then have a dedicated virtual machine running HomeAssistant which I love using for niche little automations and having smart controls all in one place.

I also have a handful of VMs running a fully functioning fictional company domain with fictional AD users and groups. This is purely a lab environment, as I’m a cyber security consultant/pentester so this is my lab to cause mayhem and destruction and test tools etc I also made sure it’s on it own network separated from everything else on my network.

I have a NAS that I use for file sharing and general Plex setup etc.

Recently bought a Bambu Labs X1C to just 3D print loads of stuff and to look pretty 💁🏼‍♂️ 😂

I’m slowly getting round to sorting all the cabling in the corner which runs to access points in the house as well as PoE cameras around the outside of my house 👍🏻

Happy to help people out who might have questions 👍🏻

HomeLab getting the RGB treatment from my mini rack.
But will have to do some cable management one day.
The setup run stuff like my kids game servers, Media Server, Backup stuff, AI stuff and all sorts of other things that I play around with.

Main hardware:

1 x Dell Precision Tower 7810, Dual Intel Xeon e5 2640 V4, 160GB ram, 6TB SSD, Nvidia Quadro P4000
1 x Cisco 3650 switch
1 x Synology DS423+ and approx 30TB storage

My laptops:

HP elitebook G5 x360 Intel Core i5 "something" 32GB ram
Panasonic Toughbook CF19 MK4 1st. gen Intel Core i5 8Gb ram (I keep it alive for nostalgic reasons)

Mini Rack content:

1 x Lenovo ThinkCenter M910q 32GB ram and 1 TB SSD and other WiFi stuff running Kali
1 x Lenovo Thinkcenter ??? 32GB ram 2 TB SSD and proxmox
1 x Raspberrypi CM5 and IO board running the screens on the rack and on the wall.
1 x 7" touch screen from Aliexpress
1 x Ubiquiti Mini Flex USB-C switch
1 x MikroTik HeX router
1 x ALFA Networks wifi adapter
A lot of 3D printed stuff for fitting everything into the rack.

And lots of other Misc stuff...

New to homelab, looks like a few fun projects, are they possible?

A company upgraded and I got my hands on these. Only bummer being that they lost the power adapter cords and they took out the ssd‘s for data protection, or so they told me.

I’ve been lurking around here and was thinking of connecting a few of them with my NAS and main computer. Creating a self hosted cloud, website and use Proxmox for virtualization (because why not). Running Minecraft servers could also be fun.

1x 7060micro i5 8th gen 6x 7050micro i5 7th gen 3x 7040micro i5 6th gen

Every single one with 8gb DDR4 RAM. Waiting before buying a network Switch because I honestly don’t know how many of these devices I‘ll need

Thoughts?

Now my living room is eerily quiet.

That’s a Poweredge T620 with 2 x Xeon E5-2690, 256G of RAM and 16 x 1.2TB drives. Inside is an Nvidia Tesla M40 and Nvidia RTX3080 founders. It runs Fedora 41 with Scrypted NVR and Stable Diffusion software. Mini Optiplex 7050 runs PFSense firewall/routing software plus a few other smaller machines and raspberry pi’s for home automation and DNS. The Equallogic SAN isn’t configured yet as I just picked that up. I have 24 x 1.2TB drives waiting to go in it. I also have two additional smaller managed edge switches each with 2 x 1GB fiber coming back to the Netgear GS752TPSv3 core switch.

This is Pluto, but now I’ve added a few more moons to it, it’s about 70% done right now, with 3 jbods going on top and a compute node somewhere in the middle to finish the rack

This may be not allowed here but I assume many of you frequent r/homelabsales I have been trying to get together a VM machine for my kids to game on and I am a broke ass dad so many people have helped me with either good deals on parts, gone pro bono or at the least help me source parts that make sense. I just want to say thank you to all of you as I believe I finally have everything ready to get my kids gaming and I truly appreciate the community. If this is not allowed mods by all means take it down. Thank you all!

Looks good to me only need to maintain rack cooling.

Hello guys, I would appreciate your help, because I really don’t know what’s the best choice in setting up this beast. First of all, please forgive me the mess, I’m currently in a building and tinkering phase and also ripped my other computers apart for a test setup I’m not going to run, for my actual use (please don’t look at the power cord of my poor gpu), so yeah there’s really everything all over the place right now.

This is a HP ProLiant DL580 Gen9 Server. It has 4 cpus, intel Xeon E7-8890v4 2,2GHz with 24 cores, 48 threads and a tdp of 165W each. 8 dimms of 16GB 2133MHz DDR4 ECC memory, so in total 128 gigs of ram. 4 power supplies, all with 1500W And 4 fan modules which can drain 54W each when they spin at max power, so in total 216W for those.

I also have 2 HDDs with 4TB whose are going to run in raid 1 as a NAS.

So the things I wanted to do are:

A Nas because I wanted to store my documents, files, fotos etc. locally at home. An hoobs implementation for apple home kit devices. And occasionally hosting a Minecraft server for me and my friends. I know this “needs” are an absolute understatement for that server but I’m more than convinced that this is just the beginning of my journey so there will soon come other things too.

For context, I’m a student at a technical university and living in a private dorm, so I have neighbors close by and I have to pay for my electricity bills by myself. I’m gaming and modeling cad on my “normal” pc and the other one was just for hosting a minecraft server.

The problem with the other “pc” is, it only has 4 cores, so besides hosting Minecraft on it with already poor performance I’m not able to do anything more on it simultaneously. Before I bought the HP server I experimented a bit with proxmox and a couple of vms, so that’s definitely something I wanna stick to.

And the problem with this server ist that its WAY TO LOUD with those crazy fans at the front and it consumes also a ridiculous amount of electricity just idling, it was around 310W-350W.

To my questions, is there:

-an option in the bios menu to turn off some of the cpus, so they don’t consume power? Or other tweaks for power reduction?

-any way to reduce the fan speed and noise from those fans? So I can have a conversation in my room without shouting at each other, not even talking about comfortable existing or sleeping anymore.

-a workaround so the storage controller (Smart Array P380i) accepts also not hp certified ssds? I tried putting in a Samsung sata ssd in the sas bay, but the controller did not recognize it. (Yes I know, putting something somewhere it doesn’t belong and wondering why it doesn’t work seems not that smart but apparently its the lack of certification from that ssd which causes the problem, not the fact that its an sata ssd).

Maybe a better solution for the Nas and hoobs implementation? Idk running it on a raspberry or other micro boards. If yes, are there any cheap alternatives to a raspberry pi?

Thank you for reading :)

tl;dr: bought a massive server and started questioning life choices after hearing it boot and seeing the power consumption. Any ideas for a workaround?

https://preview.redd.it/crtxxcz8vl2f1.png?width=756&format=png&auto=webp&s=964f55e50c676948a2f7eddffe0e9c1f1f507297

Hey everyone!
In general I'm new to homelabbing/networking but I wanted to share with you a small repo that I'm using to automate different aspect of my homelab:

such as:
- automatic update and upgrade of vms
- scheduled WOL or Poweroff for certain vms
- automatic folder/file deletion
- automatic installation of essential-packages (like: git, curl, wget, htop...)

...For anyone using nextcloud, I created a job that allow you to scan a specific user directory

The repo contains multiple playbooks for Ansible, I'm using semaphore in order to have a GUI

I'm managing to integrate support for docker (such as delete unused images, ecc) and in general I'm trying to grow this small project.

Any advise is much appreciated!

Btw check out my homelab -> https://network.leox.me

At least 32GB are okay

Sooo I'm here now. Intel NUC6i7KYK with 6TB of RAID 1 (2x 6TB 3.5in HDDs) for primary backup, and a new Thunderbolt 3 enclosure (4x 512GB 2.5in SSDs) for...something. That last one doesn't have hardware RAID and I'm not really sure how best to use it. Thought it was for 3.5in at first since I have a couple lying around. I haven't even really set up my Ubuntu Server install with Immich, Jellyfin, Nginx, and Nextcloud (or something similar). I'm barely getting by with guides and Gemini and/or Grok as my assistant. Any advice on a simple one-stop guide or ideas for the 4-drive enclosure?

Does anyone have recommendation for a rackmount for lenovo tiny pcs (full rack size) that does not cost $70-$120 per mount? Im checking ebay/amazon/temu but they all cost over $70 which is the price of the pc itself. I was able to find cheap rackmount but its for those smaller racks.