If you are in the loop for all the shenanigans of r/homelab, this may appear to be a modest setup. But it’s enough to learn the fundamentals of most things. I can see a few Xeons in my near future though.
Please hold your judgements for my current cable mess. I recently had to diagnose an issue with one of the Proxmox nodes. Had to ensure it was not a keystone/cable related issue.
- UniFi Dream Machine Pro
- UniFI Standard 24 PoE
- HP EliteDesk G4 800 DM (x4) – Proxmox HA cluster w/ CEPH
- Raspberry Pi 4 8GB (1) – PiHole (DNS Server)
- Raspberry Pi 4 8GB (x3) – Kubernetes (Microk8s) cluster
- Synology DS1520+ (27TB) SHR RAID – Primary backup
- Synology DS220j (16TB) SHR RAID – Secondary backup
Background of the lab
The Raspberry Pi cluster, DS220j and UDM Pro were the pioneers of my homelab experience. Prior to that I was virtualizing operating systems (OS) as needed on my laptop or desktop. Anybody remember the old live USB/CD dual boot days? Those were good times! Pshh, I still remember running DOS off a floppy in my after school MS-DOS class in third grade. We are sure privileged nowadays. Enough of the back in my day rant!
The RPi cluster running K3S/Microk8s in some ways feels like my first home lab experiment, or perhaps my first DevOPS experiment. However, it did not satiate my appetite for long. The constant wipe/restore procedures with microSD cards keep learning at an uninspiring crawl. I did manage to get Grafana running and synchronized the cluster with Microsoft Azure. So well worth the money for the experience!
About six months later, I came across a Facebook Marketplace deal for four EliteDesk G4 800 DMs only thirty minutes away.
My compliments to HackTiny for the beautiful picture!
This was enough power for me to explore a real virtualization solution. Proxmox installed effortlessly – I setup a VLAN to isolate the cluster, and presto! I am now hosting multiple VMs and a few LXC containers. And even better, I have set them all to backup as needed. Now I can fail over and over again at an accelerated rate!
Experience
Problem-Solving and Administration
Automation and Scripting
Hardware Management
Network Administration
Windows System Administration
Linux System Administration
Virtualization
Kubernetes
Cluster Administration
Distributed Storage