Initially I started my adventure in building an HomeLab on an old laptop, where I installed Proxmox and did some testing with several VM’s and HomeAssistant.
It probably would have been enough if it didn’t had two annoying issues. Every couple of days, the laptop froze and I had to manually reboot it. The second issue was that BIOS did not support resuming to the last power state in case of a power shortage. I couldn’t run the laptop for more then a few days without having to physically interact with it which meant I didn’t have a reliable server for running services or home automation.
After struggling with this setup for a couple of months I decided it was time for an upgrade.
I spent several weeks researching online about best practices in hardware builds for an HomeLab. I read blogs, joined several groups dedicated to this topic on Reddit and Facebook. The more time I spent researching, the more I got frustrated of how easy it was for people living in US, Germany or UK to access all kind of second hand server-grade equipment at heavily discounted price. I either had to make a compromise and buy consumer grade equipment, spent extra money on shipping tax to order it outside of my own country, or get lucky and find a good deal in my own country.
In the end, it payed off to be patient, because I got lucky and found a complete system for sale locally. I asked for opinions on Reddit before committing to buying it, and everybody said it was overkill for what I wanted to run in my HomeLab. In the end, I chose to disregarded their advices and went with my gut feeling. I payed for the entire PC around 800$ and now I had the equipment needed to fulfill any project I wanted.
My future server was a beast:
- CPU: 2x Intel Xeon E5-2640 v3, 2.6Ghz, 8 cores, 16 threads
- Motherboard: ASUS Z10pe-d8
- RAM: 192 GB Kingston DDR4 2400MHz with ECC
- PSU: 750W Segotep 80+ Platinum
- Black case
The PC was sold without any storage or optical units. I didn’t need any CD-ROM or DVD-ROM for what I intended to use it, but I had to do something for storage. I added 3 spare HDD’s from old laptops I had laying around. Two drives of 1 TB each were configured in ZFS mirror RAID to have some kind of redundancy for my critical data. The third HDD was a smaller one, around 750 GB and I decided to use it to store less important data, like tv shows and movies. For the host operating system I bought a 1TB M.2 2280 consumer SSD from SWORDFISH. The final purchase was an 1 GB Ethernet PCIe card which I planed to passthrough to a VM running a dedicated firewall.
Having all the necessary hardware it was time to second phase into the wonderfull world of building and maintaining a HomeLab, installing the needed software.
Over time, the HomeLab grew by adding IoT devices, Wifi range extender, climate control, UPS, printer and other equipment. Most of the hardware is housed in a rack, mounted on a wall under the staircase in my house. The rack is located in a separate room which I use as a closet. This helps a lot to reduce the discomfort caused by noise and heat. At least once a year, I unplug the equipment and clean it with compressed air.
I chose Proxmox as the host operating system used for virtualization with various services running in multiple VM’s. Initially I started with VM’s running a firewall, local DNS, various docker containers and a few more test servers. The software, services and the overall architecture of my my HomeLab are constantly adapting and evolving when I find some kind of software or an equipment which adds value to my HomeLab.
I think overall it was a good decision to start my own HomeLab even if the journey is not an easy one. I gained a lot of experience and I added a lot of functionalities which bring value. I learned the importance of having a robust system and the effort it takes to maintain it. I learned the important of documentation and this is the reason why I put so much effort into setting up this repository. Besides having cool functionalities, I maintaining a HomeLab builds a set of skills which are valuable in other aspects of my life.
My only regret is that I couldn’t convince any of my friends or family to become interested in this stuff. Everyone I talked with thinks what I do is cool, but they don’t want to get into it. Because of this it’s been a rather lonley journey.
The most important thing I learned along the way, was that no matter how awesome my HomeLab is, if the Internet is my house is down because of my stuff, I’m screwed! 🙂