Homelab on a Shoestring Budget

Homelab-ing is a very fun hobby for any budget and skill level. If it's just logging into a consumer router and playing around a bit or buying a server rack and loading it up with the latest and greatest enterprise gear, it's really hard to go wrong as long as you're learning and having fun. I'm just going to give an overview of what I run in my homelab. I'll also briefly touch on what I like and what I don't like about it and what my plans are in the near future broken down into 3 sections: Compute, Networking, and Storage.

That sweet, sweet, storage space

I run an instance of TrueNAS Core on an older HP Storageworks P4500 G2. This is by no means the latest and greatest in storage solutions and is quite old relative to some of the better storage alternatives. However, for my purposes, it works fine, with 12 3.5" storage bays and room for expansion in the back if I wanted to add a SAS card for more hard drives down the road.

I am running a bit of a strange setup with the actual drives in the system as, again, I am very budget limited, so I will take what I can get in that regard. I am running several 3 TB hard drives in their own RAID-Z in one storage pool. I have zvols made from this formatted as NTFS because it works on most if not all distros and is easy to repair in the event of a power failure or sudden ejection/unmounting. This is all being shared over iSCSI to the various compute hosts, which I will talk about in the next section. For future plans, I am going to purchases an external SAS connector to connect to an EMC disk shelf that I purchased from a local surplus store for a quarter. I have more drives than can fit in the HP and I would expand my storage by 15 slots!

Compute/Virtualization

For virtualization, I run a few Dell Poweredge servers with Proxmox as the host OS and virtualization option. I do this simply because it is free. If I had the money I would use ESXi and vCenter which is what is used at my research lab, but I am a student on a budget, and Proxmox works more than adequately for my use case.

The physical servers are 2 Dell Poweredge R720s, 2 Dell Poweredge R710s, and an HP DL380 G7. These are all fairly older machines and are perfect for the homelab scene. They are relatively quiet, much more so than their single rack height counterparts, and run cool enough. I do tend to only have the R720s powered on when I can though, as I want to keep electricity costs down when I am in Texas. Despite being the only available servers during the winter time however, they provide more than enough horsepower for me to host this website, an instance of Emby, a Gitlab, a Domain Controller, and an NGINX proxy to serve all my content. Additionally, when I have electricity to spare, I offer up compute to the Folding@home distributed computing project to fight cancers and COVID-19. If I have more specific configuration information I will post that in a future blog installation, but that's all that's needed for now. Ultimately I am actually looking to downsize my compute resource. It's honestly too much for one person to have and only a couple servers are ever utilized at a time.

Moving packets from one place to another

This is perhaps the least interesting part of the setup to some. Just slap a switch in your lab, hook up some cables, and you're set right? Well, yes, I suppose, but there's so much potential for learning and enjoyment. I run a Cisco Catalyst 3750X 24 port POE switch in my homelab. That was a lot of words and acronyms, but all it means is it has 24 RJ45 ports for ethernet and has Power Over Ethernet, meaning I can power access points, security cameras, etc. Currently I have my compute vlan for my servers and a wifi vlan for my Cisco APs and not much else. Speaking of those APs (Access Points) I have several Cisco 3502i access points, only 1 of which I am utilizing at the moment. I live in a 1 bedroom apartment, any more than 1 would honestly be overkill. All of the routing is done via an R620 running pFsense, which is a very common thing to see in homelabs. I have heard good things about alternatives, as some recent updates to pFsense have not been so great. In the future I plan to upgrade my networking from gigabit internal to 40 Gigabit internal networking with the use of Mellanox Connect-X 3 Pros and an Arista switch. I do not have one in mind, but rather, I am just looking for one that's at least reasonably priced and is 40 Gb capable.

Oh yeah, how is all this stored and run?

Well, in prior pictures, it was not featured, but you got to see my rack, which is a Great Lakes rack. It would definitey not be my first pick, it has missing side panels, and is a bit dinged up from being moved all over the country, but it was free from a local business, so what's a guy to do? It has 44 rack units and is ever so slightly shallow that I can't close both the front and back doors, but it keeps the servers off the floor. I am also running a couple 9 plug PDUs to power everything and I have a Dell 500W UPS in the event of a power outage. By no means is everything plugged into it, but I have my main compute server, the storage boxes, and a switch plugged in, just so I can safely power off and unmount all storage so the repair process is much more minimal.