Homelab update November 2023
A quick overview of my Homelab as of November 2023
Updated 6 months ago Published 6 months ago
I have been an avid Homelabber for a while now and I've built up what I consider to be a pretty sweet setup, I started off with a single repurposed PC that I upgraded from over a full over server rack.
As sad as it may sound I have always loved the idea of hosting my own server's and all of the application that I have come to depend on.
At work I mainly work with cloud providers, which is 100% the correct approach for any large company that needs to build quickly and at scale. But I've never liked the fact that so many of the managed services provided are obfuscated from the end user.
I like to understand how stuff works and my Homelab has allowed for me to explore this curiosity.
Networking
For all of my networking need's I have decided upon Ubiquiti's Unify line of network applianced and switches.
One of the biggest alures of the Unify range is that it provides a native and easy to navigate SDN (software defined network) allowing for central management of all routers and devices via the Unify controller or in my case a Dream machine pro, which leads on the network devices I currently use.
My primary router is a Dream machine pro, this act's as my primary router and Unify controller allowing for easy management of all connected devices.
The backbone of my network is a US-16-XG which is a 10GB aggregation switch.
All of my servers, Laptops and desktops are hooked up to this switch allowing for sweet sweet 10GB networking across all of my primary devices.
I also make use of the Unify network AP's which are all connected to a Unify US-24-250W allowing for POE for all of my AP's.
Servers
Primary Proxmox host
- 32 core AMD EPYC 7551P
- 160GB DDR4 ram
- 6 3TB HDD's
- 8 4TB HDD's
- 4 1TB NVME drives
This is my primary virtualisation server that runs runs Proxmox, It is used to virtualize all of my internal applications.
My main works loads are a number of Kubernetes clusters that I used to test out new Kubernetes features and host a number of applications (This website and associated API) along with a number of other internal tools such as Traefik, Grafana, Kafka and so on.
Storage is powered via ZFS, I have 2 separate pools that are used to different types of VM's within the host.
I've also been playing around with a number of Lenovo mini-pc's as possible alternative to the current power hungry setup I have in place but this project is still something that I'm working on.