Showing off some of my lab

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Hey

I felt like posting today, so in this post I am going to discuss the makeup of my personal homelab.

At the moment of writing this post, I am running 3 different physical hosts+Networking as my lab. Most of my enterprise equipment is in a cellar space which gest cold during the winter. And also procecting my hearing since I don’t want to listen to servers running on 24x7

  1. My Custom PC-HW-NAS running Truenas Scale
    Ryzen 5 3600 onm a AMD B550 platform
    32GB RAM
    a NVMe Boot drive
    2x 4TB seagate Ironwolfs (ZFS mirror)
    GTX 960 (kinda just an placeholder for display output that I don’t really have another use for) 2GB
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    I am running mostly my SMB-shares for various stuff and then my Nextcloud VM on this machine.

I had do completely reinstall Truenas a while ago since for some reason some iscsi implementation fried the installation medium aned I did not have the energy of spenind hours trying to fix the borked install.

So I installed a completely fresh version of Truenas Scale, and cleared the drives since I was not 100% sure it was just the OS that was bricked. I probably lost some files in the process that were not properly backed up at that time since I had to reinstall one of my drives on my PC as well. But nothing major.

  1. SVR2-“pizza box”
    This is a server that I have had since this founded the foundation of my homelab. Full specs after the picture
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    IBM X3550 M3 running proxmox VE 8.2
    2x Xeon X5570 4c/8t totaling 8c/16t
    64GB DDR3 ECC
    2x 675W PSU
    Direct-attach drive controller: IBM ServeRAID M1015 I think, just a rebranded LSI chipset that I don’t remember on top of my head. It is driving 2x 146GB 10K SAS-drives as JBOD’s and 2x1.0TB WD SATA drives as JBOD
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    Note that all the direct attach drives are 2.5" drives.

I am using this as my critical homelab-services server. It is running
-Nginx proxy manager
-Ubiquiti Network Server VM for my ubiquiti network equipment.
-My backup truenas VM that is running an HP MSA60 diskshelf through an LSI 9200-8e -PCIE HBA on the High profile PCIE-slot

On the last point, I have been debating moving the critical stuff off this server and maybe ordering an cheap aliexpress xeon lga2011 platform for those to run on.

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This disk shelf is on top of the Ikea Lack shelf-thing. Suprisingly though, that shelf was not able to fit into the lack-rack so it now sitting on top of the whole setup.

The MSA60 is actually equipped at the moment with 3x Ironwolf Pro 4TB refurb drives running in a ZFS RAID-Z1 (so 1 drive redundancy). Currently my backup target of my main NAS and also the LXC-templeate and ISO-location for all my proxmox hosts.

And yes, I moved that switch on top of it, since there is not actually any holes on the side of that shelf

  1. My IBM X3850 X5
    Shown on the picture above, it is the massive 4U server running 4x Xeon X7550 I think (total of 32c/64t) and 512GB of DDR3 ECC accross 64DIMM’s
    RB it is running an SAS 3GBps contoller and some 2.5" drives (1x samsung 1TB SSD, 3x IBM 300GB SAS 10K in RAID Z1 I think.)

And then to networking. I am running an Ubiquiti US-48-500W switch with also an POE wifi5 access point that I got off a friend who was bored with it. I am also running an USW-flex-mini 5 port gigabit switch as an signal repeater uplink to the rest of my home LAN.

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Previously I was running that Cisco C2960X-switch as my homelab Switch but I had trouble accessing the damm thing.
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Here is the size difference

This is all for now!
If you found this interesting or wish to chat about some of the decisions I have made, feel free to comment down below! :slightly_smiling_face:

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Keep it up. I love seeing the evolution process of peoples home labs. How do you like Ubiquiti? I switched from Meraki to Ubiquiti myself. With Mikrotik being my storage switch.

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I guess I would have to go with polished when it works and annyed at the level of documentation in case of issues.

After this post, I did add a ubiquiti USG (Unify Security Gateway) between my home lan and new labnet. The problem is that I have not really managed to figure out how to setup the management VLAN. I guess one of the features is that there has been access to VLAN 1 on every device.

But it might also be that it would be EOL and that is the issue. Maybe I need to get an cloud gateway ultra for the labnet. Might resolve the issue below as well.

The biggest worry for me is the ubiquiti controller, since it is running in the production tier SVR2. But SVR2 ruins only when I need it, so not on 24/7. I am reliant on that Network serve -LXC to work properly and if it screws up, all my connections are screwed.

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Also a public service announcement

If you are running a USG in production tier, or honestly anywhere, I would suggest you start to expect it to fail. I have heard that it is a pretty common thing with total failure rate approaching 100% on those external PSU.

Luckily those are not that expensive, a few euros per unit if you really need them. I am sure you can find those yourself but I got my replacement unit from an Aliexpress IP-cam.

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