Recommendations for homelab equipment

[GLaDOS]

(Apologies in advance if this belongs in a different thread - tried to pick one that looked most applicable.)

Hi all,

I'm trying to get started in the world of home labs. I've tinkered around with VM's on my desktop for a bit now, but I want to take it up a notch and have VM's that are on and accessible 24/7.

My primary goal behind this is to have a lab to mimic and tinker with an Enterprise-like environment in order to keep my skills sharp and be able to learn new IT skills at home without having an RGE (resume generating event) while testing something at work.

I'd like to put all of the VMs on their own VLAN of my home network (am switching over to Ubiquiti first) and create a domain with the following:

-One or two domain controller VMs
-A pfSense firewall VM
-A Nessus home VM
-A Splunk Free VM
-One or two workstation VM's (to simulate end user machines)
-Maybe a Plex Media server to stream to the TV?
-Maybe a Folding@home server?
**If you have any other suggestions for apps to run in a home lab, please let me know!

I'm trying to look at the different hardware options available to start creating a homelab with. The Dell PowerEdge servers seem to be very common. However, my primary concern (as I'm sure is the case for many) is the noise factor. I don't have a great space for putting servers so my office looks to be the best spot for the time being (plenty of room there). Are there any recommendations for quiet servers or other type of hardware to use in a homelab? A colleague at work had mentioned the idea of clustering a few NUCs and a NAS together as a homelab. Any thoughts or experience with that?

I'd really appreciate any guidance or suggestions. Thanks as always!

 

[PP Mguire]

My 42u rack is relatively quiet all things considered. I'd get yourself a small 4 post rack and start building yourself 2U/4U chassis to run these VMs and store your equipment in. If you want to mimic any kind of real environment I'd go ahead and make a patch panel, grab a power conditioner, and a UPS too.

 

[iFargle]

For enterprisey stuff, go with what PP said. It'll cost you a bit more, but the experience is worth it.

If you just want to tinker with VM's, NUC's will work great. I used to run three of them in a ProxMox cluster. Now I run two HP servers w/ 22 linux containers and two VM's, using under 20GB's of RAM:

https://kek.gg/i/LRxXC.png

I went a bit crazy with it. reddit.com/r/selfhosted and the Github awesome-selfhsoted sites are great for this stuff. though I never messed with VLAN's and all that at home, mostly because I'd have to redo all my cabling and I really don't want to

 

[GLaDOS]

Thanks for the feedback PP Mguire and iFargle!

PP Mguire - what type of servers are you using in your rack? And can you give me an idea of how loud they are and how much heat they generate? I've been trying to get creative about where to possibly put A rack at home. Right now I am looking at my office, but I have a little bit of room in my utility closet. However the rack would be right next to my water tank or boiler depending on position. Not sure that's ideal??

 

[PP Mguire]

Currently I have a Z620 with dual 8 core Xeons and a 4U chassis that has a Pentium G4650 and 10 HDDs. The rest is my AT&T gateway, Ubiquiti USG 3, Ubiquiti 16 port POE switch, my enterprise 24 port (not in use), a power conditioner, and a UPS. It's stuffed in a closet in the laundry area right now and despite no real airflow it doesn't get loud at all really. This winter once I really start throwing stuff at it I suspect it'll get louder but heat build up will only depend on your usage of all the components at once. My server gets hammered daily by Plex users and I've maxed all 32 threads quite a few times since my upgrade this past weekend. It does generate a bit of heat but all I did was put a blower fan on low at the bottom to get it circulated. Without use it's whisper quiet. This is what my rack currently looks like.

By this winter I should have another 2U with an i5 in there for a dedicated game host box and FTP box. I should also have another shorter 4U with a Threadripper in it for transcoding purposes and my clients.

 

[iFargle]

I've converted all my media so Plex doesn't have to transcode anything. It took months, but it's great now

 

[PP Mguire]

I've converted all my media so Plex doesn't have to transcode anything. It took months, but it's great now

I use straight BD most of the time, so converting to lower quality for people using PS4s and such is necessary. I'm not going to downgrade my content so others with crappy devices won't buffer. On the weekends I typically have over 20 people streaming so my server getting hammered is expected regardless of transcoding. Most of the time it's TV AC3 to AAC, and to this day I still don't understand why uploads are AC3 when everything needs to be converted to AAC. For movies the first audio track I convert from DTS-MA/TrueHD 5.1/7.1 to AAC max quality down mixed with Prologic II so the only thing being transcoded for their end is video. It also gives a healthy bump to voice volume for those running stereo or soundbars.

 

[iFargle]

oh man I only have like 4-5 people on mine. Immediate family only. Been winding it down as I switch to Emby.

 

[PP Mguire]

oh man I only have like 4-5 people on mine. Immediate family only. Been winding it down as I switch to Emby.

Reason for switch?

 

[iFargle]

Purely philosophical. I <3 open source. Nx Witness is my last in use closed source box in my house, which is just a duplicate service for Zoneminder so I'll phase that out soon.