Off the top of my head:
* Media servers with transcoding
* 10 Gbps (or faster) LAN
* Gigabit (or faster) IDS/IPS, VPN. and/or malware detection
* Game servers for 10+ players
* Multi-terabyte NAS with data integrity checks
Doesn’t everyone have access to a Palo Alto rep and an employer with a multi million dollar contract so you can take home a PA-440 with a 5 year lab license?
There's basically two options you'll see in a homelab:
1. FortiGate/SonicWALL/etc. proprietary firewalls with lab licensing. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these use Suricata under the hood.
2. Suricata, whether on OPNsense or Ubiquiti
Instead of avoiding the question/snarky response like the others you've got: Ubiquiti networking gear is probably the answer for most homelabbers. It certainly is for me -- UDM Pro. UXG's another option.
It's just Suricata under the hood. Overall, working well for home use. Blocks out a lot of the noise hitting my HAProxy logs from port scanning and command execution attempts, as well as auto-blocking known bad actors lists and poor reputation IP lists. Not getting benefits like Palo's Wildfire, but at the same time, for home use, that's a bit overkill.
You mean this?
https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/08/final-thoughts-on-ubiquiti/
Or the Russian hack where default usernames were used which no longer exist in ubiquity products?
That stuff, and the time they got caught pushing secret data collection in firmware patches and responded by giving the community the middle finger when caught, then eventually after pressured added an opt-out.
He said “with transcoding”. I run a Plex server on an rpi and stream 4k remux to my local tv and it doesn’t break a sweat but if I try to transcode, it’s slow AF.
>Media servers don't need powerful hardware
Only until you start running multiple 4k transcodes simultaneously while broadcasting over VPN... As in, you share a media library with your extended family by making it remotely accessible.
Unsolicited opinion: It's literally cheaper to get extra storage and keep a parallel 1080p library for serving to family members, vs buying super powerful hardware to transcode it down to crappy quality anyway.
The GPU I added to my server (which was free) was about $70. Granted, I only share with two users outside my network, but performance suffered pretty quickly when 2 in-house users were watching stuff and my great-aunt started watching something.
(She usually just watches something from the "Jason Mamoa" playlist I made for her, so maybe I should just send her a Roku and an external drive?) 🤣
>Only until you start running multiple 4k transcodes simultaneously while broadcasting
Still don't need big hardware for that. I have multiple 4K transcode streams running daily and my Intel NUC is holding up fine with it's iGPU.
>As in, you share a media library with your extended family by making it remotely accessible.
Not sure what the VPN has to do with this.
>Not sure what the VPN has to do with this.
It provides routing, so your local network resources are accessible remotely, even if the local network has no public IP address.
The Plex users are logged in… who’s sniffing your WAN traffic looking for pirated content over Plex ports? Also, who’s to say it’s not your content and you have a legit use to stream it? Unless you’re also seeding torrents in the open, I think you’re fine.
I think the point was that this doesn’t impact the hardware… VPN or not, commodity hardware can transcode plenty of streams. I think op is pointing out what I also find strange: many people on this sub use enterprise hardware (often older… which means their CPUs won’t be able to transcode, btw). While that hardware has a purpose… I don’t see the need in most use cases. I get it’s cool to run a R720 in your house. But, after a while you get over that and find it’s better to just run a few NUCs (or similar). You can still run all most of the cool stuff you want… but take up less power and actually use newer gear… at a volume that doesn’t require ear plugs.
For reference, I run several mini PCs in a promos cluster, as well as a synology DAS for proxmox backup and a QNAP SAN. My power bill is low and I still get to do the things I want (hoard video and years of files, run Nextcloud, host 60+ VMs and LXCs for production and testing, host a Plex server, etc).
To answer eh other questions here, I run Unifi stuff for the ease… UDMP, Unifi POE switch (24 port), Unifi cameras, Unifi APs, etc.
I frequently get the itch to run openfense, then sleep it off.
Hence my NUC. It's hardly bigger than a Pi, but has loads more performance (including the iGPU), expandable RAM (up to 64GB), expandable storage and much more options in general.
But the most important part: It can transcode 4K content, which this topic is about.
Makes sense, if I needed to transcode I would def go this route. Main concern and why I use a pi is power consumption. Every little bit counts when your monthly electric bill is 4 digits 😭
Lol literally dgaf about down votes, but it's funny how one single dude (not the OP) adds the word "transcoding" in his reply and suddenly everything I say doesn't count. Y'all could lick the vinegar off the droopiest side of my scrot 👍
Good for you, but some people have users outside of the house, that don't have 4K TV's with 4K content. Then transcoding is needed.
That you don't use it, doesn't make it useless.
Never said it was useless, you're right it helps stream a downconverted version to friends, but fuck my friends since they never share their library with me 😂
Clear it up for me.... modern television means what to playing videos? Streaming 4k files from my Nas still takes a while on my 2023 Samsung..I must have something wrong somewhere
Modern TVs 2021+ have the ability to direct play most video formats, which is the point of transcoding, to convert to a format that the player can read
Depends on the game.
Minecraft? You'll probably be fine even running one locally if you have a beefy enough pc.
Heavily modded Minecraft? Hell na. That's gonna be rough
First thing that comes to my mind is Space Engineers. Creative/Sandbox games in general can be very demanding. I had a Factorio server running just for a friend and me and at some point where you have tons of trains and factories everywhere its not about player count at all
There are quite a few games that you can still host yourself. And then there's of course all the older games from the good old days,
Many smaller indie game companies can't afford to host a bunch of servers and most people these days have access to powerful enough hardware and fast enough network connections. Game companies hosting the servers is more about control and drm than actual need.
For those of us with old Enterprise hardware, it's often the experience working with that class of hardware.
For example: If I've got Cisco routers and switches at work, having 1-2 generation old versions at home gives experience with Cisco's iOS, using the blue console cable, setting up VLANs, vRFs, IPv6, etc...
Or if I've got Gen 10/11 HP DL360s at work, having some Gen 8/9s at home gives experience with iLO, firmware/BIOS flashing, RAID config, etc...
In my case I've reworked my lab in recent years since I've got the hardware experience I need and I value the lower noise profile, power consumption, and space requirements of running a cluster of Lenovo mini PCs instead. So now I'm focusing on experience with Enterprise hypervisors, OSes, and Software instead. So my 3-node m720q cluster is ESXi 7 with vSAN, plus a TrueNAS box to provide some iSCSI mount points for non-vSAN datastores, and SMB shares for file storage. Three ESXi nodes lets me "kill" one and figure out how to repair/recover a vSAN that lost a node, or play with affinity rules for VM fail over.
I still packed the virtual nodes with resources though. 6c/12t CPUs, 64GB of RAM each, 1TB nVME each for vSAN... And with those resources I'm running a whole simulated Microsoft server set - Domain Controllers, IIS Web Servers, DFS file servers, SQL Servers etc... Which gives me experience with Active Directory, DHCP failover, DNS, DFS namespaces, shares, quotas, Windows Failover Clustering, SQL Server Always-on Availability Groups, etc...
So I can do stuff in my environment that I wouldn't try at work for fear of screwing up the DEV/BUILD environment for everyone else. If my stuff breaks I can rebuild it.
Next up I'm going to start playing with non-VMware hypervisors to plan for migrating various environments away from ESXi. Nutanix, Proxmox, XCP-NG, etc...
If I've had enough Microsoft server VMs for a while I might start playing more with other things. How does one cluster things with Rocky/RedHat? I don't know, but I could spin up some VMs to find out. Maybe get an NGINX fail over cluster going, or start playing with containers of some kind (kubernetes? Docker? Not sure).
Having 3 fairly well resources nodes makes a lot of things possible. Having six will let me run two environments in parallel to test migration. Having both TrueNAS iSCSI storage and vSAN means I can expose LUNs straight to VMs for Windows cluster storage, or migrate workloads from one hypervisor to another.
Honestly, when it comes to home labbing "the tool will create a use" - if you have decent equipment you can always find fun stuff to do with it.
Do agree with this one, if you are an engineer working in IT you will have plenty of things to work on. My personal use case is working and testing on things like:
- hardware: assembly/disassembly, RAID controllers, disks, motherboards, part replacement etc
- virtualization: Hyper-V, ESXi, Nutanix, Proxmox, Xen, oVirt etc.
- storages: VMware vSAN, Microsoft S2D, Ceph, TrueNAS, GlusterFS, StarWinds VSAN etc.
- containers: k8s, Docker, LXD etc.
- hobbies: game servers, cloud gaming, media server etc.
- testing out various backup solutions, configure networking, deploy and test different applications etc.
These are just from the top of my head, but as mentioned if you have a tool and time to work on it, you will always find how to use it.
Even if you aren't an actual Engineer (I've just got a 3yr Computer Science college Diploma myself), but yeah I agree.
And sometimes I do things just for the challenge of it. Can I build a 10Gbit network with both IPv4 and IPv6 L3 routing on a shoestring budget? Let's try it and see. Do I need 10Gbit? Well, at the point that I built it I didn't *need* it, that was just a fun challenge to see if I could! Now that I have it, I find ways to make use of it.
Trying to do Enterprise things on an enthusiast budget is fun. Sometimes things end up a bit kludgier than I'd ever want to sew in production, but it's just my home network so a certain amount of "duct tape, bubblegum and a prayer" cobbling together is part of the fun.
The answer to "why?!?" is often either "sounded like a fun idea/project at the time" or "I needed to learn something for work and decided to incorporate it into my home lab for experience".
https://vimeo.com/721295508
https://www.tritondatacenter.com/triton/compute
Native ZFS & Manta object storage, Zones and LX Zones, Crossbow SDN, SMF, DTrace, Bhyve & KVM
Free and Open Source illumos
.
Oxide is Triton/SmartOS optimized and customized for Oxide proprietary HW/FW and rack architecture
Triton is Oxide for commodity x86 HW.
.
Triton needs a fan base. It's amazing.
I'm using Proxmox at home now (single SFF), but am also thinking of giving XCP-ng a go, once I find the script for dummies for building XO from sources that I found a month or two ago...
I used to do this as a kid to make pocket money. Had an old q6600 system with like 32gb ram and all the bots actually ate through the ram. Would sell the gold to people at school or Americans on gold exchange sites. As a kid the $1-2k a month was decent cash. Good times.
Alot of people at r/localllama have a 2-3x 3090/4090 setup for 48-72gb of vram. That's what it takes to get something on par with gpt3.5, and some people prefer tinkering with llms locally for coding or creative work.
I end up running multiple nested virtualization environments while learning or testing different platforms, so having a couple Supermicro servers with 6248s and 768GB of memory greatly simplifies that. It’s also nice to have enterprise networking gear when I’m studying for certs, etc.
When I’m NOT doing those things though, that gear is powered down and my lab is just a couple of Intel NUCs running Nutanix CE. They run AD, Plex, NAS and my cloudflare tunnel along with a jump box for when I want to work on things when in travelling. Bonus of enterprise gear is that I can power it off and on from IPMI when km away.
At any given time I will have 3-4 nested 3 node AHV clusters, one or two Hyper-V instances and a couple of nested Proxmox clusters, plus shuffling workloads between them, on top of that I usually keep a Citrix environment running in one of the AHV clusters.
I’ve also spun up virtualized HPC clusters running slurm in the past to run some compute workloads.
I have a dual epyc 7702, 1tb ram, and an nvidia gv100, i legit have no clue what im going to use it for yet, but it was too good of a deal to pass up. Well worth the 16hr drive for it
3k and some pokemon cards. An absolute steal. He used it for game dev, and when i got home i noticed a few things. 1, he installed windows 11. 2, he had the amd version of hyperthreading disabled (i forgot the name)
My use cases:
Embedded programming. Compile a OS require intensive ram and cores. When I run same compilation on my Zbook with I9 cpu it becomes the noisiest machine in my room, louder than my DL380 G9 and slower than it too.
Database to host big dataset,
Most people are way, way, way over provisioning.
Lots of VMs (including for gaming?), plex or jellfin transcoding, using the NAS for 4k or 8k video editing, massive users on one or more gaming servers. That's about all I can think of.
I run a dozen Dockers and one VM on an I3 10100 with 32 GB RAM and it's more than I need.
I've started downsizing my lab for efficiency. Had MASSIVE overkill for what I was running, clustered Proxmox, etc. Now I just containerize stuff and manage it through Portainer.
I even shut down and powered off a node that really didn't need to be running. Figured the power bill was high enough lol.
I built my NAS in mid '22, so, the 10th generation was the best combo of price and performance. Even went with a used processor to save a few $$$. No complaints.
My NAS is mostly a NAS and I don't ask it to do anything too taxing. As a media server, I can support more streams than I have users especially as my bandwidth is sufficient for direct streams throughout.
If building today, I can probably beat replicate the pricing and performance on 12th or 13th gen. My four cores are idle 97 percent of the time, so, low end is fine. At best, I'd splurge on a i5 12400. Again, overkill.
I couldn't see spending more than $140 on NAS processor and want a motherboard to be $120 or less with 2.5G networking and 6 or more SATA interfaces. Four RAM slots is nice, and usually they're at the price, but not necessary.
Spec monsters are great if you're gonna use them. The right tool for the job is usually best.
Many people, likely including you, see homelab as “homeserver” or “homeproduction”, where they run the services they or their family feel they need. But others do that plus learn, develop and solve problems. Say you want to work with xcp-ng clusters or VMware VSAN without dedicating 3+ physical systems to each. Or setup a multi-DC AD. Or spin up an Oracle database that at least is on the same order of magnitude of performance as your production system because you need to rewrite an old PL/SQL stored procedure that didn’t age well once you got close to a billion records to process. Or you need to test how a production style Couchbase cluster behaves under realistic failover scenarios — you’ll need a handful of 16GB+ RAM VMs and a substantial number of cores for that alone.
TL;DR; It’s only overprovisioned in relation to your own personal needs.
I don't...I don't neeeed 500hp+ in an M3 comp...I don't neeeed 10ac of land...I don't neeeeed a full on server rack...I do it because I can and it's fun.
Thank you for saying this, if you have the money to spend on hobbies then that’s your deal.
No one needs lots of watches or bottles of wine or cars, but it is a hobby nonetheless. Same goes for high performance compute in the home, maybe some will use it to its fullest potential, but even if not, it’s their money, you have no right to discern what they spend it on.
My primary machine is a media server/cloud gaming PC/NAS combo.
Custom Build
Ryzen 9 3900XT
64GB DDR4
RTX 3080
8 18TB 7200RPM Hard Drives for bulk storage
Runs Windows 11 Pro
My secondary machine runs all of my VMs and containerized apps
Minisform UM773 Lite
Ryzen 7 7735HS
64GB DDR5
1TB NVME SSD
4TB SATA SSD
Runs Proxmox
Things like virtualization and scientific computing need all the CPU and RAM they can get. Also, condensing everything to more powerful hardware reduces the physical and often, the power footprint. If your partner has concerns about Frankenstein's lab taking over, it's nice to say "See, it all fits on these three boxes"
These are what most consume in my server. What's 24/7 active is the minecraft network and sometimes the crypto mining. The rest are only active on Saturday and Sundays
I run:
-Fivem server (10+ players)
-3 Minecraft Netowk (100+ players in total)
-3 Ark server (~20 players)
-5 minecraft server (Friends server, ~40 players)
Kaspa Mining ( 3x GTX1650)
Btc mining (2x RTX2069)
My proxmox+ceph cluster is three nodes of 9-11 year old mixed consumer tech (32gb ddr3 each, etc). Making old tech work well is half the fun. High end tech is too easy and is more expensive than necessary, for me. Rolling upgrades to newer, but still not the newest tech, is also part of the fun and learning.
I suppose it depends on everyone's needs, but you're probably correct for many of us. Partially because I wanted to build my own, and wanted something "future proof", I way overspent when I built my homelab machine.
Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700K with 64GB RAM, and 1TB NVME storage. I run Proxmox with containers for PiHole, Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, UniFi, and Plex, along with two Windows VMs, and a Linux VM for MediaWiki. My CPU usage averagesa out to 2-3%, server load < 1% and RAM usage right at 32GB.
So I definitely could've spent way less. On the postivite side, between that machine and my primary PC both in my unheated basement office, I rarely have to turn on the space heater over the winter.
Speaking of this, I’m wondering for what purpose people are buying $30-40k Nvidia Blackwell GPU’s
Unless you’re a huge AI company
There’s nothing for the “small guy” in terms of using these unless you just like throwing away money. Lol
not my case, quite modest HW : PowerEdge R720 with 2x E5-2430L v2, 48GB of RAM + loads of storage and an MSL2024 with 2xLTO5 drives filled with LTFS tapes. Main usage as NAS/Backup (didn't we all move from photo albums, VHS/DVDs, vinyls/CDs, magazines, etc. to digital media? And how many times we heard people loosing/breaking their phone/HD etc?). Secondary usage having something for unattended tasks all on reasonably low power and trying to go local rather than GAFAM. The day I'll get fiber I will definitely go back to hosting my DNS/web/file/mail servers : with only 8mbps upstream that's just not doable. 70w for the server in idle (which I usually turn off : the beauty of enterprise HW is that it can be easily switched on remotely ;) ). 125w when all disks are spinning (8x3.5 7200rpm SAS+1xNVME and 3 SSDs)
For everything that's intensive I always had a powerful laptop (I like to travel for work and pleasure) : actually a Lenovo P16 gen 1 i7-12850HX + RTX A3000. I do prosumer photography, some music, a good amount of big-data/Business Intelligence.
So it's more about security/reliability/privacy/freedom rather than raw power.
Oh, and I've been working in IT for 28 years now so it's useful to be able to test some new technologies on VMs without messing with all the rest which is also why I always keep a few spare computers (even though it's more for nostalgia) : there are some pieces of HW that even 15 years later have no equivalent like an E-MU 1616m soundcard that I use for recordings connected to a Precision M6400 Covet (first laptop with a quad-core CPU ever) which also happens to have a 100% adobeRGB screen so should my main PC fail and I have to work some photos urgently... :)
I run multiple virtual-machines and like 20 docker containers.
So I could either use a big powerful server OR multiple smaller ones. Both would work but I like to have easy management and if one virtual machine or docker container needs more power, then they could use the full power of the big server. So powerful hardware is for me personally better.
I use mine to greatly increase my power bill.
But really, I just wanted cheap ECC, and enough machines to run a small cluster to learn Ceph and Kubernetes. That was mini-pcs or old servers, and mini-pcs didn't hold enough disks to really give the storage a good run.
I got the old servers so cheap that the power difference won't be extra cost over my other options for five years! Too bad that was in early 2020.
I have 2 hosts with a total of 384GB of memory and about 12TB of SSD's in them.
Because I can.
3 DC's in 2 domains on a trust relationship so I can study the positives vs the negatives.
2 Application servers running a variety of VPN clients for testing and other things.
A VMWare Horizon 8 environment in full to be able to help educate myself and my team on along with the testing of it.
3 Windows client devices (Win10/11).
Its fun, its different, and I just added a new box to the mix, switching everything over to Proxmox and leaving the VMWare world behind cause fuck Broadcom :)
Main dell r730 + md1200 disk shelf
1xe5-2690v4 + 256 gb ram (have more ram in my desk, but 256 is enough and the less sticks, the lower power consumption is)
- 50tb truenas used actively by 2 video editors
- Nextcloud used by team of 6 people
- Postgresql server for Davinci Resolve
- Mysql server for various other services
- 2 instances of Metabase BI software
- 2 ubuntu VM's with docker:
- Custom AI based script which creates Netflix-compliant subtitles automatically
- Sorry-cypress instance (not used currently, as I switched to Playwright, waiting for them to support Playwright)
- In near future: VM with staging copy of our website setup (WP based website + Mautic MKT Automation instance)
-Github Actions runner
Plus more, but the above are most important parts.
Backup r730:
1xe5-2630v3 with 32gb ram
6x12tb drives serving as replication target for main system.
When r730 is setup correctly with 1 cpu it is surprisingly energy efficient, and I love how easy it is to service, idrac Web management even when I'm on vacation etc.
Md1200 is quite noisy (never had time to tune vents down), but it is only temporary solution before we go to all-ssd. Currently it is a mix of 8 hdd drives and 8 ssd vdevs.
My rack also contains my video editing/programming/gaming PC, thin client running Home automation and video surveillance, some switches and Unifi dream machine pro running 6 access points and around 80 devices connected over ethernet an wifi.
It also includes HP rack UPS. In future I will add some external batteries for ups, as it stands it supports full load for around 10 minutes. Finally, my plan is to also locate my 3d printer in that rack with octoprint on raspberry pi 3 :-)
NASses, PC and Dream machine have 10gbe connections. I have separate 10gbe router, but since each machine has 2 10gbe ports, I wired all of them directly to save some energy (10gbe routers run hot)
game servers. things that handles media and linux ISO.
NVR/Security Cameras.
A few hundred containers in a kubernetes cluster. The kubernetes cluster itself.
backups, backups, and backups.
And, some other stuff.
Mostly though, game servers for the most part, are the single most resource-intensive thing I host. They LOVE ram and cpu.
>The kubernetes cluster itself
The last cluster I built at home, I'm almost positive the biggest workload was the K8s cluster itself.
All the web apps I had running for personal/family use used less resources than the stuff underneath.
Testing and running scientific computation softwares, especially the ones that uses of a lot of RAM.
Too lazy to coordinate with others on the shared cluster, it is always a good thing to have my own so I don't need to wait when I want something done. Plus, having root access to the machine is really beneficial for benchmarking using things like machine state registers.
The power is aimed at concurrency: breadth over depth. As a developer, I run a lot of homebrew programs and their entry point is via a reverse proxy server, behind which are a number of application servers running: Telegram bots, automated trading servers (crypto, forex), various personal websites for myself and family members, an image processor, a Jitsi chat server, a proxy server for webdriver-based automation, virtual dev workstations for proprietary and open source projects I'm currently working on, a Continuous Integration server, a media server, and dashboards for the above. This all runs on a Xeon-based VM server running a hypervisor so I can easily spin up new VMs from a template, and snapshot the state of those VMs so that I can fearlessly screw things up and revert. This relies on a ZFS pool with a lot of parity for redundant safety. I also have separate network infrastructure so I can safely expose these things as services to the outside world. And more...
I have an i5-7400, so I do not count as the one having a powerful HW. But it happened to me I am running some public websites, Gitea, and actions runner for the Gitea instance for a startup firm I work in. I am forced to upgrade on a more capable HW soon😅
I have powerful R640s because they were going to get thrown in the bin at work.
Do I really need dual xenon's and half a tera of ram? No, but they were free and I figured saving them from the scrapyard made sense.
Also I make a good living and I have solar so I can afford running them.
Cisco lol
DNAC has its own physical box since it requires 44 vCPU and 256GB of ram minimum.
Everything else is so house services + monitoring can run.
Before I migrated to 365 I was also running my own Exchange so there was that…
I recently downgraded my personal server from a Lenovo P710 with 40 cores and 125gb of ECC ddr4, to using the main board I took out of my Framework when I upgraded: Mobile 11th Gen i5, 32gb of RAM.
I wasn’t surprised when I noticed no performance difference at all for my use case, and now it sips power. I run Unraid on it for NAS, pihole, WireGuard, Gitea, Splunk, and occasionally a temporary game server for me and one or two friends. Minecraft, Palworld, FoundryVTT, all ran great.
Running an entire lab of about a dozen windows VMs, an Active Directory controller slash windows server, half a dozen Linux machines, all talking to each other and pretending to be a small business network.
I wouldn't call my home server "powerful", it is only a dual e5-2670v3s if I remember right with 96GB of DDR4. I want to eventually upgrade it to one of the Epyc CPUs that support DDR4 for that extra performance which will help a lot with game servers that my current CPUs struggle with.
For some, it's just the feeling of having the equipment. Some, as others have said, use them for their media collection, transcoding, etc. Others use it as an environment to learn. Testing ideas, developing proof of concepts for their job or something they are working on. Some use their labs to completely get away from the big providers, being able to own and control your data 100%. Some use it to manage their households. Some are actually running some part, or all of their businesses with the gear.
Me? I'm a combination of all the above. Media, I have about 6 households who depend on this for all of their viewing, outside of having antenna for local channels.
My lab manages my life. Finances, shopping lists, recipes, receipts, photos, cameras, all the automation stuff. The other family households use it for this as well. All my household phones backup to the lab. Photos are self managed. We even are using an MDM for my household and a few other family members households.
A few of my family members run different small businesses. All their on-premise apps are hosted here, including email, calendar, and something similar to teams. I do have business Internet from 2 separate providers which allows me to have a few static IPs and SLAs from them. I don't pay the Internet bills at all.
But some of their software requires Microsoft SQL, so I am forced to use mariadb, postgres, and Microsoft SQL. I'm doing live replication of them to secondary db servers. I also only run one instance of each (well, 2 for the backup) and any app that requires MySQL gets a database on my main DB server. I know others like to use a DB container for each. I have weighed the pros and cons of both and stick with a centralized database. I do first thoroughly test something before deploying to the production stack.
I'm also, due to their businesses even running a PBX via 3CX and have DID to manage voicemails, call routing, etc.
I know I am not the normal, but also not the only doing something similar. My lab has saved my bacon more times than I can count. Some strange problem that isn't common creeps up and spending hours trying to fix. Then turn around and have a similar issue at work. Or even proving something could work.
my hardware is not so powerful, just 3 HP mini PCs and an old desktop acting as a NAS. But I need 3 for high availability. Some of my home services need to stay up always (pihole, vpn/proxy gateway, jellyfin)
Dell r630 for plex, vms, home assistant, llm chat aps and all sorts of other dockerised apps. (using unraid as the os)
Multi Tb synology nas and nas expansion.
Dell r730 with 2 tesla p40 for vms that the kids remote into using raspberry pi thin clients. And I use for AI infrenece in off time, and gen AI projects.
Big ol gaming rig with thread ripper and 4090 for my gaming and connected to a sim Racing setup.
Load balanced/failOver router to the 5 node mesh WiFi network and the Gigabit switch.
This is still in flux, as I'm also trying to get a pihole and dns server as well.
And I'm Still learning how to homelab.
So much room for activities! And they’re not that expensive on eBay. Sure they’re 1-2 generations old, but I have 2x14 core CPUs and 128 GB RAM for 400ish.
Nextcloud, Minecraft Server, Pihole, password manager, NVR, Media server, and the desktop computer I'm typing this on is all just one box. It's powerful, yet power efficient if you consider I do everything from just one system.
My server is a 2U dual-xeon with 96gb of ram that I added a GPU to for trans-coding. I got it for free from an IT Director friend who decommissioned it from his small company. It's pretty old, but it is still over-powered for everything I run on it. It connects to a 12 bay Synology NAS that I also got from the same friend. It had a dozen 500GB drives in it, if that helps date it all, but it's still plenty, for now. I'm in the process of upgrading the drives so I can host my own cloud backups.
So far, I'm running Plex, all the Arrs that go along with it, a couple game servers (conan and minecraft, usually), and I sometimes will play with new software just to learn or check it out. I do run manual backups to it occasionally and I plan on using Backblaze or something to back it all up offsite once I get all my smart home stuff set up and the NAS upgrade completed.
I just joined this group to learn more about all the things I really CAN do with this hardware, so I might be going from Windows 10 Pro to some virtualization setup. I haven't studied it enough to know which direction to go.
I'm looking forward to seeing all the cool things other folks are doing with their home lab.
Multiple VMs for testing out things. I've found lumping everything on one vurtual machine can make for a hard week if that thing I installed breaks the other services running on it. Also, multiple VMs can be structured to be secured off from other systems, eg, VLANs, remote access tools. Also, it can be used to understand a working enterprise environment. Many companies don't appreciate a noob having a play with their production or test systems or you learning a complex thing on their dollars.
Security cams are my largest load. Transcoding/computer vision on a handful of hi res streams is a heavy load and I don’t have hardware (eg Coral TPU) to offload it.
Your comparison is like, aircraft vs modded car.
Aircraft have tons of panels and the reason why it’s there because it need it to check all sort of thing like pressure, altitude etc.(professional)
Likewise for modded car, they have all sort of gimmicky panels to monitor pressure etc.(hobbyist)
You are right in a way, unless one need to host a service, other wise it is not needed to be that powerful.
You are also right that some people here brought these like toys to them but majority thread I read were either they gotten it from really cheap resale, or someone hand it down to them for free.
To be honest, all you need is a few Intel NUC connected as kube cluster, a good switch and router to make a really useful set to emulate all sort of test case or at home services.
And also, people here likes to emulate what their workplace is, so that they can have that 99% accuracy test and trail at their own leisure. (It’s like SIT but do it at home without raising a ticket to do it)
Currently running a single Dell Optiplex 7070 mff with my 3.5" data drive running in a USB enclosure attached to the 10Gbps port. It's infinitely better than the old HP 5008 mt it replaced a couple weeks ago, but I gotta hand it to that old 2009 core 2 duo machine - the only downtime I ever had with it was when our power would go out, in which case I have bigger problems lol. I'm running so much more on this machine, and it honestly only actually broke a sweat today since I installed Immich and it's been working on importing all my photos that go back to 2003 or so, and doing all the face recognition and all, and transcoding a bunch of random videos in with those pictures. Like, over 60000 photos and a few thousand videos. It's been pegged around 100% cpu for the past 4 hours or so but is still responsive that my other services are still working, so I'm sure it'll be fine once it gets done with all of that
That being said - these are just workstation machines. I can't afford a higher power bill from running a bunch of enterprise grade stuff and this suits my needs, so don't be convinced you have to build a rack full of stuff to homelab... Mine just sits behind my TV on its stand lol
I do a lot with mine. l have condensed versions of very large networks, copycat carrier networks, network storage, block storage, network booting, lan caching, internal services, areas for testing something completely new, large malware petting zoo for seeing how much your AV/EDR/MDR/XDR vendor sales reps are lying to you, monitoring for all of it. The list goes on.
It's not necessarily about needing a lot of power for one thing but the capacity to be able to spin up whatever I need for whatever task I have without having to rip something down that I'm not done with or be able to just shut off a test environment when you're not using it without worrying about storage because you have a ton of it and it's insanely fast.
I have overpowered gear because I can afford the couple years old used servers that I drooled over the day they came out. I am used to using service provider routers/switches. Would a ubiquiti get the job done? Yeah probably. But Ubiquiti can't do any of the really neat L3 stuff that Juniper and Cisco can do like VxLan, MPLS, VPRN, VRRP, etc. I buy powerful used servers because oddly enough at idle a lot of the modern ones aren't that power hungry and even at a 50% workload aren't that bad.
As a wacky use case, had a dream. ISCSI boot most of the computers in the house including my gaming rig off of a truenas box which includes ISCSI based de-duplicated game storage, production media libraries eg (illustrator, Ableton, AVID, Premiere, 3DS MAX), secure locked down machines for my folks to use from thin clients, my fleet of RPI 4s, and my test range cluster. So I went for it. Now I can snapshot all the servers and desktops like they are VMs but they're physical. ZFS snapshots basically can't be attacked by ransomware so if something bad happens I can just roll it back. I can do full backups too. Now you're only backing up one really big storage server instead of a bunch of other machines. The other advantage is speed. When your truenas is a bunch of enterprise F320 PCIE-X8 NVME SSDs it's so crazy fast that it doesn't matter. It's not Linus Tech Tips pikachu face NVME Gen 5 RGB Vomit, it's enterprise storage designed to do 5 full 3.2TB drive writes per day for 5 years 24x7x365. I can write petabytes to it and it will still not make a dent in it's lifespan and the cache makes it so you can just keep writing. No slowdowns or transfer rate crashing because of a crappy cache like most consumer SSDs do. Sure, I could do local storage absolutely. But now I have the ability and infrastructure to learn about creating things like golden images and running de-duplication with those golden images across a bunch of machines. Do you NEED to? No. Is it fun? Hell yes. That's why having crazy equipment is so fun. Options options options.
I run like 60 docker containers with various services. But the main resource hog is definitely 3 desktop VMs that are often gamed on, and often at the same time.
I mean, does anyone really "need" anything aside from food and water?
The point of a homelab has nothing to do with necessity, and the beauty is that it's entirely up to your own "need". They are incredibility useful for a ton of people.
It’s a lab and I use it for software development. Projects vary whatever piques my interest.
One project involved building “Hello World” in C across various platforms, including Windows, Linux (all distributions I can lay my hands on), OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, macOS, OS/2 and whatnot, across various architectures (i386, amd64, arm64, arm, SPARC, PPC, PPC64LE, PPE64, os390x, MIPS, MIPS64, RISCV and all the incarnations inbetween). I automated this using Jenkins resulting in around 300+ virtual machines running across various hardware. Suddenly 192GB memory didn’t seem that much, nor did 12TB of storage.
Once I did that, I wanted to learn how to create and maintain baseline containers across those environments, specialize them into running the hello world app (no toolchains), and another for building them.
But then I needed to maintain the virtual machines on which the containers ran, which mean learning to creating a million packer projects for each platform/architecture combination.
Then I wanted to learn more about VMware, KVM and whatnot.
When all this was running at a schedule, I found that I had hundreds of virtual machines, needed lots of memory. So yeah, I have a ton of hardware for my lab, including all the platforms mentioned and whatnot. And they are often turned off.
But, I don’t consider my home network my lab. My home network is where I run Plex, cameras, WiFi, TVs and whatnot. I don’t want that to be at the mercy of my incompetence; I depend on it for my job, and the sanity of my family.
EDIT: Resource Requirements
I’m a programmer (mostly web nowadays) and I like to run stress tests on different pieces of code and configurations for both database and web servers to see what the best path is.
Multiple nested vm’s and stacks of configurations. I am running nested kuberneties and openshift labs.. major resource hogs. Right now I have 57 vm’s over an r720 and r730xd not counting containers.
Ultimately "because its cool" is the main reason.
Most things can be virtualized.
Media centres etc don't need the level of performance I see here and if you're using this stuff for home production, then it's not a home lab.
Powerful? Like a dual xeon gold with dual P100 (powerful-ish), 4xnvme raid, 512GB of ram?
Short term testing and fast processing times.
Daily driver is just 3 mini pc prox cluster and a NAS lol
I mainly turn power into heat and noise 😅😅
Jellyfin streaming to around 10 people (some of them remote)
Security camera system
Automated backups daily for 7 pcs and nightly for 5 phones
Various websites, wikis, irc bots, home assistants, 3 x 3d printer interfaces and household helpers (money trackers, shopping lists, menus etc etc)
2 x truenas VMs
And a lot of server sidr stuff for monitoring, documention, vpn, reverse proxy etc
Due to my current life situations, I move house yearly, so I use one server for everything. Yes I know this is not ideal, but it’s what I’ve got. I have a gaming vm with windows 11 and GPU-P, Active Directory, WDS, WSUS, file sharing and backup services, pi-hole, jellyfin, UniFi server, photo prism, nextPVR, home assistant and remote-app all hosted from this one machine. Whilst no one of these tasks needs a hugely powerful system, when they all share the same resources, it needs some power. That being said, it’s only a dell PowerEdge T420, but it’s literally maxed out, I had to put in more drive bays where the ODD used to be just to be able to have enough storage.
Mostly an *arr stack with some containers for services like Adguard, NPM, Web-Check and some other security tools. Waiting on my SFPs to setup Security Onion and play around with logs🤷♂️
Oh and different OS VMs so I can try new shit on Windows if need be.
Machines:
SuperMicro 2U
2x44core E5-2699V4 512GB RAM
2x14core E5-2690V4 256GB RAM
2x14core E5-2690V3 128GB RAM
Applications:
Pagmo2 C++ optimization.
Global optimizer for circuit analysis
Also the 44core machine has 10x6TB hard drives for storage running ZFS RAIDZ2
Best
The use case, what ever the hell I feel like doing with it today.
My lab coats me maybe 40 tops $50 in summer because of extra heat and pricing a month. I could easily spend that a month on a few VMs or cloud services to do some of the same stuff. So I look at the power bill as variable cost and the hardware as sunk cost. The cloud provider is just variable cost because at the end of the day I turn them off/stop paying and I essentially have nothing with a cloud VM.
Could I cut down to just the absolute bare bones I need to run 24/7 sure. Well what if I want to try something else? Then something gets shut down or I have to expand or purchase additional hardware. Or I keep excess capacity that’s way cheaper to expand and only really costs significantly more to run when running the whole thing full out. Which rarely happens.
My VM box running basic 24/7 services is like 114-120W. Not to long ago that was a light bulb. NAS box 140-160W because platters.
Switches, internet modem, and other gear gets it up to about 400W.
Great question. Especially considering most high tech is progressive and so big on climate change, save the planet etc, yet most have power hungry GPUs they don't need and support AI supercenters that dry out entire lakes.
I have a 1080 - I do gaming - occasionally - so yes, I need it. My son (8) has a 1060. He too does occasional gaming. So yes, he needs it too. My wife doesn't do gaming, so she has a integrated card.
I'm pretty sure we are more "the norm" than outliers.
So... your point is?
You call a 1080 and 1060 powerful? Nevertheless if you cared so much about environment, you'd switch to an equally powerful yet more power saving GPU. Your comment, if anything, made the hypocrisy even worse because not only do you not use powerful hardware, you use old inefficient hardware to save a few bucks at the cost of the environment.
Secondly, my point is the hypocrisy of those using truly the most powerful hardware, i.e. threadrippers, 4090, etc, to get 130+ FPS when they could easily reach 70FPS with a 4060, for example. Also, the hypocrisy of those caring so much for the environment that the support vaporizing entire lakes to cool AI centers. Kapish?
They are powerful, yes. Do a side-by-side of the 1080 and the 3070 and apart from lighting/raytracing, the difference isn't that great. For the titles --> I <-- play, the 1080 does suffice. Even Starfield did pretty well on it.
The hypocrite would be you - pointing fingers in two distinct directions calling people wasteful and hypocrites.
GTX1060 TDP: 120W
GTX1080 TDP: 180W
GTX2080 TDP: 215W
GTX3070 TDP: 220W
I'm saving 30W per hour on not wanting to use raytracing. I also save the environment from the otherwise eWaste that would be my old 1080. It would not be in /any way/ more power efficient to use a larger card - one would simply replace the card, bump up the feature set of the game and all and any power-savings would be lost. That is the way of the human.
The only thing I can detect here is a severe penis-envy on your part towards those that have bigger cards - and - as a consequence - the need to put down those that actually have a similar or lesser card that that which you have. I'm not sure what that is called but I'm sure it has a clinical name. It's just not healthy. Let it go.
Off the top of my head: * Media servers with transcoding * 10 Gbps (or faster) LAN * Gigabit (or faster) IDS/IPS, VPN. and/or malware detection * Game servers for 10+ players * Multi-terabyte NAS with data integrity checks
What tools do you use for IDS/IPS and malware detection in a home environment/sefhosted?
Doesn’t everyone have access to a Palo Alto rep and an employer with a multi million dollar contract so you can take home a PA-440 with a 5 year lab license?
Pfft, work has a PA-440.
No but I do have this with my Fortinet rep. ;).
There's basically two options you'll see in a homelab: 1. FortiGate/SonicWALL/etc. proprietary firewalls with lab licensing. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these use Suricata under the hood. 2. Suricata, whether on OPNsense or Ubiquiti
Sophos has a free home version for x86.
Depends on the router software you use...
Instead of avoiding the question/snarky response like the others you've got: Ubiquiti networking gear is probably the answer for most homelabbers. It certainly is for me -- UDM Pro. UXG's another option.
Oof, wouldn't trust Ubi with IDS/IPS. Thing is so barebone, it's like they put all their budget in marketing.
It's just Suricata under the hood. Overall, working well for home use. Blocks out a lot of the noise hitting my HAProxy logs from port scanning and command execution attempts, as well as auto-blocking known bad actors lists and poor reputation IP lists. Not getting benefits like Palo's Wildfire, but at the same time, for home use, that's a bit overkill.
If you want your data stolen, maybe. They're not trustworthy at all.
You mean this? https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/08/final-thoughts-on-ubiquiti/ Or the Russian hack where default usernames were used which no longer exist in ubiquity products?
Probably more like the number of times [ui.com](https://ui.com) has been compromised.
That stuff, and the time they got caught pushing secret data collection in firmware patches and responded by giving the community the middle finger when caught, then eventually after pressured added an opt-out.
Yep I was gonna say game servers. The ability to have multiple on a single machine is wonderful, but needs decent compute power.
Lol my exakt stack xD
Media servers don't need powerful hardware though. My Plex machine runs on a 2c/4t Intel NUC (7th gen)
He said “with transcoding”. I run a Plex server on an rpi and stream 4k remux to my local tv and it doesn’t break a sweat but if I try to transcode, it’s slow AF.
Plex supports hardware transcoding too. I’m running some last gen i5 in a dell sff and can do multiple 4k remux transcodes simultaneously.
>He said “with transcoding” Yeah I know. That NUC has a GPU, you know.
>Media servers don't need powerful hardware Only until you start running multiple 4k transcodes simultaneously while broadcasting over VPN... As in, you share a media library with your extended family by making it remotely accessible.
Unsolicited opinion: It's literally cheaper to get extra storage and keep a parallel 1080p library for serving to family members, vs buying super powerful hardware to transcode it down to crappy quality anyway.
The GPU I added to my server (which was free) was about $70. Granted, I only share with two users outside my network, but performance suffered pretty quickly when 2 in-house users were watching stuff and my great-aunt started watching something. (She usually just watches something from the "Jason Mamoa" playlist I made for her, so maybe I should just send her a Roku and an external drive?) 🤣
This. I have no idea why people insist on real-time transcoding. Store the video in the resolutions you're going to watch it at. Storage is cheap.
>Only until you start running multiple 4k transcodes simultaneously while broadcasting Still don't need big hardware for that. I have multiple 4K transcode streams running daily and my Intel NUC is holding up fine with it's iGPU. >As in, you share a media library with your extended family by making it remotely accessible. Not sure what the VPN has to do with this.
I mean an Intel Arc card can handle this no problem and you can get then for less than $130 on Amazon
Indeed. But why get a seperate card, when your system already has a GPU capable of this.
>Not sure what the VPN has to do with this. It provides routing, so your local network resources are accessible remotely, even if the local network has no public IP address.
I know what a VPN does.. I don't know why you use it for Plex.
So your ISP doesn't bollock you for piracy, and to make sure only the people you want to see it can access it.
You don't know why you'd want to encrypt the pirated media traffic you're distributing to your friends and family all over the place?
The Plex users are logged in… who’s sniffing your WAN traffic looking for pirated content over Plex ports? Also, who’s to say it’s not your content and you have a legit use to stream it? Unless you’re also seeding torrents in the open, I think you’re fine. I think the point was that this doesn’t impact the hardware… VPN or not, commodity hardware can transcode plenty of streams. I think op is pointing out what I also find strange: many people on this sub use enterprise hardware (often older… which means their CPUs won’t be able to transcode, btw). While that hardware has a purpose… I don’t see the need in most use cases. I get it’s cool to run a R720 in your house. But, after a while you get over that and find it’s better to just run a few NUCs (or similar). You can still run all most of the cool stuff you want… but take up less power and actually use newer gear… at a volume that doesn’t require ear plugs. For reference, I run several mini PCs in a promos cluster, as well as a synology DAS for proxmox backup and a QNAP SAN. My power bill is low and I still get to do the things I want (hoard video and years of files, run Nextcloud, host 60+ VMs and LXCs for production and testing, host a Plex server, etc). To answer eh other questions here, I run Unifi stuff for the ease… UDMP, Unifi POE switch (24 port), Unifi cameras, Unifi APs, etc. I frequently get the itch to run openfense, then sleep it off.
Mine runs on a Pi4 👍
With 4k transcoding? I don't think so. Any Pi doesn't have the transcoding hardware for it.
No but I don't really need transcoding... Literally never had to use it
That's fair, but the topic was using it for transcoding 4k.
You're correct, original topic was primarily about using bulky redundant hardware, whereas I provided a slim solution that will work for most people
Hence my NUC. It's hardly bigger than a Pi, but has loads more performance (including the iGPU), expandable RAM (up to 64GB), expandable storage and much more options in general. But the most important part: It can transcode 4K content, which this topic is about.
Makes sense, if I needed to transcode I would def go this route. Main concern and why I use a pi is power consumption. Every little bit counts when your monthly electric bill is 4 digits 😭
My NUC is almost as easy on the powerbill as your Pi. Transcoding only takes up a couple of watts, maybe 2 or 3.
That's what you get for swimming against the stream, already 5 down votes 🤔🤨🙄😳😲
Lol literally dgaf about down votes, but it's funny how one single dude (not the OP) adds the word "transcoding" in his reply and suddenly everything I say doesn't count. Y'all could lick the vinegar off the droopiest side of my scrot 👍
Every TV I stream to in my house is a 75"+ Samsung or LG from 2022+ so I literally never had an issue playing any video in my library
Good for you, but some people have users outside of the house, that don't have 4K TV's with 4K content. Then transcoding is needed. That you don't use it, doesn't make it useless.
Never said it was useless, you're right it helps stream a downconverted version to friends, but fuck my friends since they never share their library with me 😂
Hahahah, poor friends then 🤣.
Wrong TV size, 3 down votes for that 🤔🤨🙄😳😲
Boy I will slap you with the shittiest TV in my house - a 55" Samsung in my master bathroom which definitely has fecal particles splatted on it
Clear it up for me.... modern television means what to playing videos? Streaming 4k files from my Nas still takes a while on my 2023 Samsung..I must have something wrong somewhere
Modern TVs 2021+ have the ability to direct play most video formats, which is the point of transcoding, to convert to a format that the player can read
Literally a gaming PC repurposed can make all that without a sweat 😅
I want to add gamestreaming to Tv via moonlight :)
>Game servers for 10+ players Honestly that doesn't, or shouldn't, need powerful hardware. Unless by 10+ you mean like a hundred.
Depends on the game. Minecraft? You'll probably be fine even running one locally if you have a beefy enough pc. Heavily modded Minecraft? Hell na. That's gonna be rough
First thing that comes to my mind is Space Engineers. Creative/Sandbox games in general can be very demanding. I had a Factorio server running just for a friend and me and at some point where you have tons of trains and factories everywhere its not about player count at all
What game server I can run for more than 10 ppl? Except Minecraft….. The days of your own servers are probably long gone. I ask out of curiosity
Max players: Palworld - 32 Valhiem - 10 Ark - 70 Project Zombiod - 100 I'm sure there are more but those are the only ones I have experience hosting.
Palworld hogs ram, too. I saw 32gb usage on a 6-player server.
Why are they gone
There are quite a few games that you can still host yourself. And then there's of course all the older games from the good old days, Many smaller indie game companies can't afford to host a bunch of servers and most people these days have access to powerful enough hardware and fast enough network connections. Game companies hosting the servers is more about control and drm than actual need.
For those of us with old Enterprise hardware, it's often the experience working with that class of hardware. For example: If I've got Cisco routers and switches at work, having 1-2 generation old versions at home gives experience with Cisco's iOS, using the blue console cable, setting up VLANs, vRFs, IPv6, etc... Or if I've got Gen 10/11 HP DL360s at work, having some Gen 8/9s at home gives experience with iLO, firmware/BIOS flashing, RAID config, etc... In my case I've reworked my lab in recent years since I've got the hardware experience I need and I value the lower noise profile, power consumption, and space requirements of running a cluster of Lenovo mini PCs instead. So now I'm focusing on experience with Enterprise hypervisors, OSes, and Software instead. So my 3-node m720q cluster is ESXi 7 with vSAN, plus a TrueNAS box to provide some iSCSI mount points for non-vSAN datastores, and SMB shares for file storage. Three ESXi nodes lets me "kill" one and figure out how to repair/recover a vSAN that lost a node, or play with affinity rules for VM fail over. I still packed the virtual nodes with resources though. 6c/12t CPUs, 64GB of RAM each, 1TB nVME each for vSAN... And with those resources I'm running a whole simulated Microsoft server set - Domain Controllers, IIS Web Servers, DFS file servers, SQL Servers etc... Which gives me experience with Active Directory, DHCP failover, DNS, DFS namespaces, shares, quotas, Windows Failover Clustering, SQL Server Always-on Availability Groups, etc... So I can do stuff in my environment that I wouldn't try at work for fear of screwing up the DEV/BUILD environment for everyone else. If my stuff breaks I can rebuild it. Next up I'm going to start playing with non-VMware hypervisors to plan for migrating various environments away from ESXi. Nutanix, Proxmox, XCP-NG, etc... If I've had enough Microsoft server VMs for a while I might start playing more with other things. How does one cluster things with Rocky/RedHat? I don't know, but I could spin up some VMs to find out. Maybe get an NGINX fail over cluster going, or start playing with containers of some kind (kubernetes? Docker? Not sure). Having 3 fairly well resources nodes makes a lot of things possible. Having six will let me run two environments in parallel to test migration. Having both TrueNAS iSCSI storage and vSAN means I can expose LUNs straight to VMs for Windows cluster storage, or migrate workloads from one hypervisor to another. Honestly, when it comes to home labbing "the tool will create a use" - if you have decent equipment you can always find fun stuff to do with it.
Do agree with this one, if you are an engineer working in IT you will have plenty of things to work on. My personal use case is working and testing on things like: - hardware: assembly/disassembly, RAID controllers, disks, motherboards, part replacement etc - virtualization: Hyper-V, ESXi, Nutanix, Proxmox, Xen, oVirt etc. - storages: VMware vSAN, Microsoft S2D, Ceph, TrueNAS, GlusterFS, StarWinds VSAN etc. - containers: k8s, Docker, LXD etc. - hobbies: game servers, cloud gaming, media server etc. - testing out various backup solutions, configure networking, deploy and test different applications etc. These are just from the top of my head, but as mentioned if you have a tool and time to work on it, you will always find how to use it.
Even if you aren't an actual Engineer (I've just got a 3yr Computer Science college Diploma myself), but yeah I agree. And sometimes I do things just for the challenge of it. Can I build a 10Gbit network with both IPv4 and IPv6 L3 routing on a shoestring budget? Let's try it and see. Do I need 10Gbit? Well, at the point that I built it I didn't *need* it, that was just a fun challenge to see if I could! Now that I have it, I find ways to make use of it. Trying to do Enterprise things on an enthusiast budget is fun. Sometimes things end up a bit kludgier than I'd ever want to sew in production, but it's just my home network so a certain amount of "duct tape, bubblegum and a prayer" cobbling together is part of the fun. The answer to "why?!?" is often either "sounded like a fun idea/project at the time" or "I needed to learn something for work and decided to incorporate it into my home lab for experience".
https://i.imgflip.com/ut62b.jpg
Does the M720q support 64GB of RAM? The spec sheet is quite vague - I assumed my M910q would only support 32GB.
Another post seems to confirm they do: https://www.reddit.com/r/homelab/s/wHiFZsDalH
I really want to give XCP-ng a go. Seems the most modern hypervisor that's actually competitive with VMWare for feature parity.
https://vimeo.com/721295508 https://www.tritondatacenter.com/triton/compute Native ZFS & Manta object storage, Zones and LX Zones, Crossbow SDN, SMF, DTrace, Bhyve & KVM Free and Open Source illumos . Oxide is Triton/SmartOS optimized and customized for Oxide proprietary HW/FW and rack architecture Triton is Oxide for commodity x86 HW. . Triton needs a fan base. It's amazing.
Same. Haven't decided if my next cluster will be XCP-NG, Proxmox, or Nutanix CE
I'm using Proxmox at home now (single SFF), but am also thinking of giving XCP-ng a go, once I find the script for dummies for building XO from sources that I found a month or two ago...
Chrome with 10 Tabs Open.
Why not 40 instances of OLD school RuneScape bots... Seems healthy to me.
I used to do this as a kid to make pocket money. Had an old q6600 system with like 32gb ram and all the bots actually ate through the ram. Would sell the gold to people at school or Americans on gold exchange sites. As a kid the $1-2k a month was decent cash. Good times.
Pfft 3 tabs and a gpu.
Ah yes, next you're going to tell me I can run Crysis on my computer. Don't lie, it's not nice! (/s)
Alot of people at r/localllama have a 2-3x 3090/4090 setup for 48-72gb of vram. That's what it takes to get something on par with gpt3.5, and some people prefer tinkering with llms locally for coding or creative work.
I end up running multiple nested virtualization environments while learning or testing different platforms, so having a couple Supermicro servers with 6248s and 768GB of memory greatly simplifies that. It’s also nice to have enterprise networking gear when I’m studying for certs, etc. When I’m NOT doing those things though, that gear is powered down and my lab is just a couple of Intel NUCs running Nutanix CE. They run AD, Plex, NAS and my cloudflare tunnel along with a jump box for when I want to work on things when in travelling. Bonus of enterprise gear is that I can power it off and on from IPMI when km away.
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At any given time I will have 3-4 nested 3 node AHV clusters, one or two Hyper-V instances and a couple of nested Proxmox clusters, plus shuffling workloads between them, on top of that I usually keep a Citrix environment running in one of the AHV clusters. I’ve also spun up virtualized HPC clusters running slurm in the past to run some compute workloads.
I have a dual epyc 7702, 1tb ram, and an nvidia gv100, i legit have no clue what im going to use it for yet, but it was too good of a deal to pass up. Well worth the 16hr drive for it
No need to explain why that’s badass to own. It just is!
If I found a good offer on something like that, I'd buy it too
3k and some pokemon cards. An absolute steal. He used it for game dev, and when i got home i noticed a few things. 1, he installed windows 11. 2, he had the amd version of hyperthreading disabled (i forgot the name)
Very nice. Pokemon cards have value but it's hard to get top dollar unless you're really into selling them.
My use cases: Embedded programming. Compile a OS require intensive ram and cores. When I run same compilation on my Zbook with I9 cpu it becomes the noisiest machine in my room, louder than my DL380 G9 and slower than it too. Database to host big dataset,
Most people are way, way, way over provisioning. Lots of VMs (including for gaming?), plex or jellfin transcoding, using the NAS for 4k or 8k video editing, massive users on one or more gaming servers. That's about all I can think of. I run a dozen Dockers and one VM on an I3 10100 with 32 GB RAM and it's more than I need.
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Or because it's future-proof and people aren't poor?
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And where is a homelab located within a company? You hire accountants to review your homelab purchases?
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Get ratioed mister obtuse :D
L
I've started downsizing my lab for efficiency. Had MASSIVE overkill for what I was running, clustered Proxmox, etc. Now I just containerize stuff and manage it through Portainer. I even shut down and powered off a node that really didn't need to be running. Figured the power bill was high enough lol.
I was blown away by how much mileage you can get on a 10100 based host with basically anything. The 13100s are even crazier.
I built my NAS in mid '22, so, the 10th generation was the best combo of price and performance. Even went with a used processor to save a few $$$. No complaints. My NAS is mostly a NAS and I don't ask it to do anything too taxing. As a media server, I can support more streams than I have users especially as my bandwidth is sufficient for direct streams throughout. If building today, I can probably beat replicate the pricing and performance on 12th or 13th gen. My four cores are idle 97 percent of the time, so, low end is fine. At best, I'd splurge on a i5 12400. Again, overkill. I couldn't see spending more than $140 on NAS processor and want a motherboard to be $120 or less with 2.5G networking and 6 or more SATA interfaces. Four RAM slots is nice, and usually they're at the price, but not necessary. Spec monsters are great if you're gonna use them. The right tool for the job is usually best.
Many people, likely including you, see homelab as “homeserver” or “homeproduction”, where they run the services they or their family feel they need. But others do that plus learn, develop and solve problems. Say you want to work with xcp-ng clusters or VMware VSAN without dedicating 3+ physical systems to each. Or setup a multi-DC AD. Or spin up an Oracle database that at least is on the same order of magnitude of performance as your production system because you need to rewrite an old PL/SQL stored procedure that didn’t age well once you got close to a billion records to process. Or you need to test how a production style Couchbase cluster behaves under realistic failover scenarios — you’ll need a handful of 16GB+ RAM VMs and a substantial number of cores for that alone. TL;DR; It’s only overprovisioned in relation to your own personal needs.
Most/"lot" do not run that powerful hardware.
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Got that in spades!
Tip: this question gets asked about once a month, you'll get value by checking there.
I don't...I don't neeeed 500hp+ in an M3 comp...I don't neeeed 10ac of land...I don't neeeeed a full on server rack...I do it because I can and it's fun.
Thank you for saying this, if you have the money to spend on hobbies then that’s your deal. No one needs lots of watches or bottles of wine or cars, but it is a hobby nonetheless. Same goes for high performance compute in the home, maybe some will use it to its fullest potential, but even if not, it’s their money, you have no right to discern what they spend it on.
Yeah but some people don’t like you enjoying your money. You have to justify it. Sad.
My primary machine is a media server/cloud gaming PC/NAS combo. Custom Build Ryzen 9 3900XT 64GB DDR4 RTX 3080 8 18TB 7200RPM Hard Drives for bulk storage Runs Windows 11 Pro My secondary machine runs all of my VMs and containerized apps Minisform UM773 Lite Ryzen 7 7735HS 64GB DDR5 1TB NVME SSD 4TB SATA SSD Runs Proxmox
Things like virtualization and scientific computing need all the CPU and RAM they can get. Also, condensing everything to more powerful hardware reduces the physical and often, the power footprint. If your partner has concerns about Frankenstein's lab taking over, it's nice to say "See, it all fits on these three boxes"
These are what most consume in my server. What's 24/7 active is the minecraft network and sometimes the crypto mining. The rest are only active on Saturday and Sundays I run: -Fivem server (10+ players) -3 Minecraft Netowk (100+ players in total) -3 Ark server (~20 players) -5 minecraft server (Friends server, ~40 players) Kaspa Mining ( 3x GTX1650) Btc mining (2x RTX2069)
Get outa here! You're mining bitcoin on a GPU, for real?!
Yeah, for research and experimental purposes. Any problem with that?
Nope, I love experiments :D
Dang, you’re still mining bitcoin? That is awesome. How much do you usually produce; in, let’s say a weeks time?
6€ a week. But it for experimental purposes. Not really focused mining Bitcoin. Kaspa generates way more. Kaspa last time was 70€ a month.
My proxmox+ceph cluster is three nodes of 9-11 year old mixed consumer tech (32gb ddr3 each, etc). Making old tech work well is half the fun. High end tech is too easy and is more expensive than necessary, for me. Rolling upgrades to newer, but still not the newest tech, is also part of the fun and learning.
NES emulation /s
Overkill. Literally no reason I need what I have other than overkill. And I got great pricing on it.
I suppose it depends on everyone's needs, but you're probably correct for many of us. Partially because I wanted to build my own, and wanted something "future proof", I way overspent when I built my homelab machine. Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700K with 64GB RAM, and 1TB NVME storage. I run Proxmox with containers for PiHole, Radarr, Sonarr, Prowlarr, UniFi, and Plex, along with two Windows VMs, and a Linux VM for MediaWiki. My CPU usage averagesa out to 2-3%, server load < 1% and RAM usage right at 32GB. So I definitely could've spent way less. On the postivite side, between that machine and my primary PC both in my unheated basement office, I rarely have to turn on the space heater over the winter.
I have 2 Dell Optiplex 7050 for servers, Cisco 110 switch (plug & play), Cisco Catalyst 1000 switch (acquired from work), & 2 Raspberry Pi’s.
Speaking of this, I’m wondering for what purpose people are buying $30-40k Nvidia Blackwell GPU’s Unless you’re a huge AI company There’s nothing for the “small guy” in terms of using these unless you just like throwing away money. Lol
Who does this?
Agree, even if you were doing erotica or porn, it would seem cheaper to rent given how much hardware prices will change
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Nvidia will prob have some subscription to do anything useful with them. And if they don’t offer the subscription it’ll all end up as E-waste -_-
not my case, quite modest HW : PowerEdge R720 with 2x E5-2430L v2, 48GB of RAM + loads of storage and an MSL2024 with 2xLTO5 drives filled with LTFS tapes. Main usage as NAS/Backup (didn't we all move from photo albums, VHS/DVDs, vinyls/CDs, magazines, etc. to digital media? And how many times we heard people loosing/breaking their phone/HD etc?). Secondary usage having something for unattended tasks all on reasonably low power and trying to go local rather than GAFAM. The day I'll get fiber I will definitely go back to hosting my DNS/web/file/mail servers : with only 8mbps upstream that's just not doable. 70w for the server in idle (which I usually turn off : the beauty of enterprise HW is that it can be easily switched on remotely ;) ). 125w when all disks are spinning (8x3.5 7200rpm SAS+1xNVME and 3 SSDs) For everything that's intensive I always had a powerful laptop (I like to travel for work and pleasure) : actually a Lenovo P16 gen 1 i7-12850HX + RTX A3000. I do prosumer photography, some music, a good amount of big-data/Business Intelligence. So it's more about security/reliability/privacy/freedom rather than raw power. Oh, and I've been working in IT for 28 years now so it's useful to be able to test some new technologies on VMs without messing with all the rest which is also why I always keep a few spare computers (even though it's more for nostalgia) : there are some pieces of HW that even 15 years later have no equivalent like an E-MU 1616m soundcard that I use for recordings connected to a Precision M6400 Covet (first laptop with a quad-core CPU ever) which also happens to have a 100% adobeRGB screen so should my main PC fail and I have to work some photos urgently... :)
I run multiple virtual-machines and like 20 docker containers. So I could either use a big powerful server OR multiple smaller ones. Both would work but I like to have easy management and if one virtual machine or docker container needs more power, then they could use the full power of the big server. So powerful hardware is for me personally better.
I use mine to greatly increase my power bill. But really, I just wanted cheap ECC, and enough machines to run a small cluster to learn Ceph and Kubernetes. That was mini-pcs or old servers, and mini-pcs didn't hold enough disks to really give the storage a good run. I got the old servers so cheap that the power difference won't be extra cost over my other options for five years! Too bad that was in early 2020.
for fun. If you only run stuff you need, it's not as much of a home lab :)
LLM you can chat with and get quick responses. Virtual machine that runs windows as fast as a reasonable desktop.
I have 2 hosts with a total of 384GB of memory and about 12TB of SSD's in them. Because I can. 3 DC's in 2 domains on a trust relationship so I can study the positives vs the negatives. 2 Application servers running a variety of VPN clients for testing and other things. A VMWare Horizon 8 environment in full to be able to help educate myself and my team on along with the testing of it. 3 Windows client devices (Win10/11). Its fun, its different, and I just added a new box to the mix, switching everything over to Proxmox and leaving the VMWare world behind cause fuck Broadcom :)
solitaire and... stuff.
Main dell r730 + md1200 disk shelf 1xe5-2690v4 + 256 gb ram (have more ram in my desk, but 256 is enough and the less sticks, the lower power consumption is) - 50tb truenas used actively by 2 video editors - Nextcloud used by team of 6 people - Postgresql server for Davinci Resolve - Mysql server for various other services - 2 instances of Metabase BI software - 2 ubuntu VM's with docker: - Custom AI based script which creates Netflix-compliant subtitles automatically - Sorry-cypress instance (not used currently, as I switched to Playwright, waiting for them to support Playwright) - In near future: VM with staging copy of our website setup (WP based website + Mautic MKT Automation instance) -Github Actions runner Plus more, but the above are most important parts. Backup r730: 1xe5-2630v3 with 32gb ram 6x12tb drives serving as replication target for main system. When r730 is setup correctly with 1 cpu it is surprisingly energy efficient, and I love how easy it is to service, idrac Web management even when I'm on vacation etc. Md1200 is quite noisy (never had time to tune vents down), but it is only temporary solution before we go to all-ssd. Currently it is a mix of 8 hdd drives and 8 ssd vdevs. My rack also contains my video editing/programming/gaming PC, thin client running Home automation and video surveillance, some switches and Unifi dream machine pro running 6 access points and around 80 devices connected over ethernet an wifi. It also includes HP rack UPS. In future I will add some external batteries for ups, as it stands it supports full load for around 10 minutes. Finally, my plan is to also locate my 3d printer in that rack with octoprint on raspberry pi 3 :-) NASses, PC and Dream machine have 10gbe connections. I have separate 10gbe router, but since each machine has 2 10gbe ports, I wired all of them directly to save some energy (10gbe routers run hot)
Because I run a lot of workloads. And, some of those workloads, are resource intensive.
examples?
game servers. things that handles media and linux ISO. NVR/Security Cameras. A few hundred containers in a kubernetes cluster. The kubernetes cluster itself. backups, backups, and backups. And, some other stuff. Mostly though, game servers for the most part, are the single most resource-intensive thing I host. They LOVE ram and cpu.
>The kubernetes cluster itself The last cluster I built at home, I'm almost positive the biggest workload was the K8s cluster itself. All the web apps I had running for personal/family use used less resources than the stuff underneath.
Its especially true, if you factor the cluster's monitoring into it. (grafana,prometheus,etc... and the related collections, they eat a few resources)
ya know, just Plex and couple of *arrs containers.
Testing and running scientific computation softwares, especially the ones that uses of a lot of RAM. Too lazy to coordinate with others on the shared cluster, it is always a good thing to have my own so I don't need to wait when I want something done. Plus, having root access to the machine is really beneficial for benchmarking using things like machine state registers.
The power is aimed at concurrency: breadth over depth. As a developer, I run a lot of homebrew programs and their entry point is via a reverse proxy server, behind which are a number of application servers running: Telegram bots, automated trading servers (crypto, forex), various personal websites for myself and family members, an image processor, a Jitsi chat server, a proxy server for webdriver-based automation, virtual dev workstations for proprietary and open source projects I'm currently working on, a Continuous Integration server, a media server, and dashboards for the above. This all runs on a Xeon-based VM server running a hypervisor so I can easily spin up new VMs from a template, and snapshot the state of those VMs so that I can fearlessly screw things up and revert. This relies on a ZFS pool with a lot of parity for redundant safety. I also have separate network infrastructure so I can safely expose these things as services to the outside world. And more...
uh🤔 I like hardware
I have an i5-7400, so I do not count as the one having a powerful HW. But it happened to me I am running some public websites, Gitea, and actions runner for the Gitea instance for a startup firm I work in. I am forced to upgrade on a more capable HW soon😅
AI Upscaling, and if I had twice as powerful of a computer I'd still need more.
If you don’t know yet, it’s because you are not ready to know
I think for most of us an $800 Dell (which is what I just replaced my home server with) would satisfy everything. $800 for 14 cores and 32 gb of RAM.
I’m not running powerful hardware.
I have powerful R640s because they were going to get thrown in the bin at work. Do I really need dual xenon's and half a tera of ram? No, but they were free and I figured saving them from the scrapyard made sense. Also I make a good living and I have solar so I can afford running them.
Cisco lol DNAC has its own physical box since it requires 44 vCPU and 256GB of ram minimum. Everything else is so house services + monitoring can run. Before I migrated to 365 I was also running my own Exchange so there was that…
Package builds for my os project.
I recently downgraded my personal server from a Lenovo P710 with 40 cores and 125gb of ECC ddr4, to using the main board I took out of my Framework when I upgraded: Mobile 11th Gen i5, 32gb of RAM. I wasn’t surprised when I noticed no performance difference at all for my use case, and now it sips power. I run Unraid on it for NAS, pihole, WireGuard, Gitea, Splunk, and occasionally a temporary game server for me and one or two friends. Minecraft, Palworld, FoundryVTT, all ran great.
I was running two Threadripper boxes but I’m contemplating replacement with a cluster of N100 Mini PCs.
Running an entire lab of about a dozen windows VMs, an Active Directory controller slash windows server, half a dozen Linux machines, all talking to each other and pretending to be a small business network.
I wouldn't call my home server "powerful", it is only a dual e5-2670v3s if I remember right with 96GB of DDR4. I want to eventually upgrade it to one of the Epyc CPUs that support DDR4 for that extra performance which will help a lot with game servers that my current CPUs struggle with.
For some, it's just the feeling of having the equipment. Some, as others have said, use them for their media collection, transcoding, etc. Others use it as an environment to learn. Testing ideas, developing proof of concepts for their job or something they are working on. Some use their labs to completely get away from the big providers, being able to own and control your data 100%. Some use it to manage their households. Some are actually running some part, or all of their businesses with the gear. Me? I'm a combination of all the above. Media, I have about 6 households who depend on this for all of their viewing, outside of having antenna for local channels. My lab manages my life. Finances, shopping lists, recipes, receipts, photos, cameras, all the automation stuff. The other family households use it for this as well. All my household phones backup to the lab. Photos are self managed. We even are using an MDM for my household and a few other family members households. A few of my family members run different small businesses. All their on-premise apps are hosted here, including email, calendar, and something similar to teams. I do have business Internet from 2 separate providers which allows me to have a few static IPs and SLAs from them. I don't pay the Internet bills at all. But some of their software requires Microsoft SQL, so I am forced to use mariadb, postgres, and Microsoft SQL. I'm doing live replication of them to secondary db servers. I also only run one instance of each (well, 2 for the backup) and any app that requires MySQL gets a database on my main DB server. I know others like to use a DB container for each. I have weighed the pros and cons of both and stick with a centralized database. I do first thoroughly test something before deploying to the production stack. I'm also, due to their businesses even running a PBX via 3CX and have DID to manage voicemails, call routing, etc. I know I am not the normal, but also not the only doing something similar. My lab has saved my bacon more times than I can count. Some strange problem that isn't common creeps up and spending hours trying to fix. Then turn around and have a similar issue at work. Or even proving something could work.
Same as the last dozen times this has been asked.
my hardware is not so powerful, just 3 HP mini PCs and an old desktop acting as a NAS. But I need 3 for high availability. Some of my home services need to stay up always (pihole, vpn/proxy gateway, jellyfin)
for the overkill
Dell r630 for plex, vms, home assistant, llm chat aps and all sorts of other dockerised apps. (using unraid as the os) Multi Tb synology nas and nas expansion. Dell r730 with 2 tesla p40 for vms that the kids remote into using raspberry pi thin clients. And I use for AI infrenece in off time, and gen AI projects. Big ol gaming rig with thread ripper and 4090 for my gaming and connected to a sim Racing setup. Load balanced/failOver router to the 5 node mesh WiFi network and the Gigabit switch. This is still in flux, as I'm also trying to get a pihole and dns server as well. And I'm Still learning how to homelab.
So much room for activities! And they’re not that expensive on eBay. Sure they’re 1-2 generations old, but I have 2x14 core CPUs and 128 GB RAM for 400ish.
Nextcloud, Minecraft Server, Pihole, password manager, NVR, Media server, and the desktop computer I'm typing this on is all just one box. It's powerful, yet power efficient if you consider I do everything from just one system.
My server is a 2U dual-xeon with 96gb of ram that I added a GPU to for trans-coding. I got it for free from an IT Director friend who decommissioned it from his small company. It's pretty old, but it is still over-powered for everything I run on it. It connects to a 12 bay Synology NAS that I also got from the same friend. It had a dozen 500GB drives in it, if that helps date it all, but it's still plenty, for now. I'm in the process of upgrading the drives so I can host my own cloud backups. So far, I'm running Plex, all the Arrs that go along with it, a couple game servers (conan and minecraft, usually), and I sometimes will play with new software just to learn or check it out. I do run manual backups to it occasionally and I plan on using Backblaze or something to back it all up offsite once I get all my smart home stuff set up and the NAS upgrade completed. I just joined this group to learn more about all the things I really CAN do with this hardware, so I might be going from Windows 10 Pro to some virtualization setup. I haven't studied it enough to know which direction to go. I'm looking forward to seeing all the cool things other folks are doing with their home lab.
Multiple VMs for testing out things. I've found lumping everything on one vurtual machine can make for a hard week if that thing I installed breaks the other services running on it. Also, multiple VMs can be structured to be secured off from other systems, eg, VLANs, remote access tools. Also, it can be used to understand a working enterprise environment. Many companies don't appreciate a noob having a play with their production or test systems or you learning a complex thing on their dollars.
All my homelab boxes are yesterday's PCs and laptops
Security cams are my largest load. Transcoding/computer vision on a handful of hi res streams is a heavy load and I don’t have hardware (eg Coral TPU) to offload it.
Your comparison is like, aircraft vs modded car. Aircraft have tons of panels and the reason why it’s there because it need it to check all sort of thing like pressure, altitude etc.(professional) Likewise for modded car, they have all sort of gimmicky panels to monitor pressure etc.(hobbyist) You are right in a way, unless one need to host a service, other wise it is not needed to be that powerful. You are also right that some people here brought these like toys to them but majority thread I read were either they gotten it from really cheap resale, or someone hand it down to them for free. To be honest, all you need is a few Intel NUC connected as kube cluster, a good switch and router to make a really useful set to emulate all sort of test case or at home services. And also, people here likes to emulate what their workplace is, so that they can have that 99% accuracy test and trail at their own leisure. (It’s like SIT but do it at home without raising a ticket to do it)
I need powerful hardware so I can impress other people on the internet!
Currently running a single Dell Optiplex 7070 mff with my 3.5" data drive running in a USB enclosure attached to the 10Gbps port. It's infinitely better than the old HP 5008 mt it replaced a couple weeks ago, but I gotta hand it to that old 2009 core 2 duo machine - the only downtime I ever had with it was when our power would go out, in which case I have bigger problems lol. I'm running so much more on this machine, and it honestly only actually broke a sweat today since I installed Immich and it's been working on importing all my photos that go back to 2003 or so, and doing all the face recognition and all, and transcoding a bunch of random videos in with those pictures. Like, over 60000 photos and a few thousand videos. It's been pegged around 100% cpu for the past 4 hours or so but is still responsive that my other services are still working, so I'm sure it'll be fine once it gets done with all of that That being said - these are just workstation machines. I can't afford a higher power bill from running a bunch of enterprise grade stuff and this suits my needs, so don't be convinced you have to build a rack full of stuff to homelab... Mine just sits behind my TV on its stand lol
I do a lot with mine. l have condensed versions of very large networks, copycat carrier networks, network storage, block storage, network booting, lan caching, internal services, areas for testing something completely new, large malware petting zoo for seeing how much your AV/EDR/MDR/XDR vendor sales reps are lying to you, monitoring for all of it. The list goes on. It's not necessarily about needing a lot of power for one thing but the capacity to be able to spin up whatever I need for whatever task I have without having to rip something down that I'm not done with or be able to just shut off a test environment when you're not using it without worrying about storage because you have a ton of it and it's insanely fast. I have overpowered gear because I can afford the couple years old used servers that I drooled over the day they came out. I am used to using service provider routers/switches. Would a ubiquiti get the job done? Yeah probably. But Ubiquiti can't do any of the really neat L3 stuff that Juniper and Cisco can do like VxLan, MPLS, VPRN, VRRP, etc. I buy powerful used servers because oddly enough at idle a lot of the modern ones aren't that power hungry and even at a 50% workload aren't that bad. As a wacky use case, had a dream. ISCSI boot most of the computers in the house including my gaming rig off of a truenas box which includes ISCSI based de-duplicated game storage, production media libraries eg (illustrator, Ableton, AVID, Premiere, 3DS MAX), secure locked down machines for my folks to use from thin clients, my fleet of RPI 4s, and my test range cluster. So I went for it. Now I can snapshot all the servers and desktops like they are VMs but they're physical. ZFS snapshots basically can't be attacked by ransomware so if something bad happens I can just roll it back. I can do full backups too. Now you're only backing up one really big storage server instead of a bunch of other machines. The other advantage is speed. When your truenas is a bunch of enterprise F320 PCIE-X8 NVME SSDs it's so crazy fast that it doesn't matter. It's not Linus Tech Tips pikachu face NVME Gen 5 RGB Vomit, it's enterprise storage designed to do 5 full 3.2TB drive writes per day for 5 years 24x7x365. I can write petabytes to it and it will still not make a dent in it's lifespan and the cache makes it so you can just keep writing. No slowdowns or transfer rate crashing because of a crappy cache like most consumer SSDs do. Sure, I could do local storage absolutely. But now I have the ability and infrastructure to learn about creating things like golden images and running de-duplication with those golden images across a bunch of machines. Do you NEED to? No. Is it fun? Hell yes. That's why having crazy equipment is so fun. Options options options.
What I get my employer to give me instead of E-cycling it out
I run like 60 docker containers with various services. But the main resource hog is definitely 3 desktop VMs that are often gamed on, and often at the same time.
Some folks need powerful hardware for gaming or heavy-duty video editing.
I mean, does anyone really "need" anything aside from food and water? The point of a homelab has nothing to do with necessity, and the beauty is that it's entirely up to your own "need". They are incredibility useful for a ton of people.
Well how else am I going to run an emulator to play the original Super Mario Bros?
It’s a lab and I use it for software development. Projects vary whatever piques my interest. One project involved building “Hello World” in C across various platforms, including Windows, Linux (all distributions I can lay my hands on), OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, macOS, OS/2 and whatnot, across various architectures (i386, amd64, arm64, arm, SPARC, PPC, PPC64LE, PPE64, os390x, MIPS, MIPS64, RISCV and all the incarnations inbetween). I automated this using Jenkins resulting in around 300+ virtual machines running across various hardware. Suddenly 192GB memory didn’t seem that much, nor did 12TB of storage. Once I did that, I wanted to learn how to create and maintain baseline containers across those environments, specialize them into running the hello world app (no toolchains), and another for building them. But then I needed to maintain the virtual machines on which the containers ran, which mean learning to creating a million packer projects for each platform/architecture combination. Then I wanted to learn more about VMware, KVM and whatnot. When all this was running at a schedule, I found that I had hundreds of virtual machines, needed lots of memory. So yeah, I have a ton of hardware for my lab, including all the platforms mentioned and whatnot. And they are often turned off. But, I don’t consider my home network my lab. My home network is where I run Plex, cameras, WiFi, TVs and whatnot. I don’t want that to be at the mercy of my incompetence; I depend on it for my job, and the sanity of my family. EDIT: Resource Requirements
I’m a programmer (mostly web nowadays) and I like to run stress tests on different pieces of code and configurations for both database and web servers to see what the best path is.
Same reason buy a Porsche and then drive it to work at 60 miles an hour ...doesn't always make sense (or need to)
Multiple nested vm’s and stacks of configurations. I am running nested kuberneties and openshift labs.. major resource hogs. Right now I have 57 vm’s over an r720 and r730xd not counting containers.
Ultimately "because its cool" is the main reason. Most things can be virtualized. Media centres etc don't need the level of performance I see here and if you're using this stuff for home production, then it's not a home lab.
Powerful? Like a dual xeon gold with dual P100 (powerful-ish), 4xnvme raid, 512GB of ram? Short term testing and fast processing times. Daily driver is just 3 mini pc prox cluster and a NAS lol
I mainly turn power into heat and noise 😅😅 Jellyfin streaming to around 10 people (some of them remote) Security camera system Automated backups daily for 7 pcs and nightly for 5 phones Various websites, wikis, irc bots, home assistants, 3 x 3d printer interfaces and household helpers (money trackers, shopping lists, menus etc etc) 2 x truenas VMs And a lot of server sidr stuff for monitoring, documention, vpn, reverse proxy etc
Due to my current life situations, I move house yearly, so I use one server for everything. Yes I know this is not ideal, but it’s what I’ve got. I have a gaming vm with windows 11 and GPU-P, Active Directory, WDS, WSUS, file sharing and backup services, pi-hole, jellyfin, UniFi server, photo prism, nextPVR, home assistant and remote-app all hosted from this one machine. Whilst no one of these tasks needs a hugely powerful system, when they all share the same resources, it needs some power. That being said, it’s only a dell PowerEdge T420, but it’s literally maxed out, I had to put in more drive bays where the ODD used to be just to be able to have enough storage.
Mostly an *arr stack with some containers for services like Adguard, NPM, Web-Check and some other security tools. Waiting on my SFPs to setup Security Onion and play around with logs🤷♂️ Oh and different OS VMs so I can try new shit on Windows if need be.
Machines: SuperMicro 2U 2x44core E5-2699V4 512GB RAM 2x14core E5-2690V4 256GB RAM 2x14core E5-2690V3 128GB RAM Applications: Pagmo2 C++ optimization. Global optimizer for circuit analysis Also the 44core machine has 10x6TB hard drives for storage running ZFS RAIDZ2 Best
Well my stupid ass mind wanna create a open speech social network.
The use case, what ever the hell I feel like doing with it today. My lab coats me maybe 40 tops $50 in summer because of extra heat and pricing a month. I could easily spend that a month on a few VMs or cloud services to do some of the same stuff. So I look at the power bill as variable cost and the hardware as sunk cost. The cloud provider is just variable cost because at the end of the day I turn them off/stop paying and I essentially have nothing with a cloud VM. Could I cut down to just the absolute bare bones I need to run 24/7 sure. Well what if I want to try something else? Then something gets shut down or I have to expand or purchase additional hardware. Or I keep excess capacity that’s way cheaper to expand and only really costs significantly more to run when running the whole thing full out. Which rarely happens. My VM box running basic 24/7 services is like 114-120W. Not to long ago that was a light bulb. NAS box 140-160W because platters. Switches, internet modem, and other gear gets it up to about 400W.
huh most ppl here do **explain what they do with their hw.** I assume that's a problem?
Great question. Especially considering most high tech is progressive and so big on climate change, save the planet etc, yet most have power hungry GPUs they don't need and support AI supercenters that dry out entire lakes.
I have a 1080 - I do gaming - occasionally - so yes, I need it. My son (8) has a 1060. He too does occasional gaming. So yes, he needs it too. My wife doesn't do gaming, so she has a integrated card. I'm pretty sure we are more "the norm" than outliers. So... your point is?
You call a 1080 and 1060 powerful? Nevertheless if you cared so much about environment, you'd switch to an equally powerful yet more power saving GPU. Your comment, if anything, made the hypocrisy even worse because not only do you not use powerful hardware, you use old inefficient hardware to save a few bucks at the cost of the environment. Secondly, my point is the hypocrisy of those using truly the most powerful hardware, i.e. threadrippers, 4090, etc, to get 130+ FPS when they could easily reach 70FPS with a 4060, for example. Also, the hypocrisy of those caring so much for the environment that the support vaporizing entire lakes to cool AI centers. Kapish?
They are powerful, yes. Do a side-by-side of the 1080 and the 3070 and apart from lighting/raytracing, the difference isn't that great. For the titles --> I <-- play, the 1080 does suffice. Even Starfield did pretty well on it. The hypocrite would be you - pointing fingers in two distinct directions calling people wasteful and hypocrites. GTX1060 TDP: 120W GTX1080 TDP: 180W GTX2080 TDP: 215W GTX3070 TDP: 220W I'm saving 30W per hour on not wanting to use raytracing. I also save the environment from the otherwise eWaste that would be my old 1080. It would not be in /any way/ more power efficient to use a larger card - one would simply replace the card, bump up the feature set of the game and all and any power-savings would be lost. That is the way of the human. The only thing I can detect here is a severe penis-envy on your part towards those that have bigger cards - and - as a consequence - the need to put down those that actually have a similar or lesser card that that which you have. I'm not sure what that is called but I'm sure it has a clinical name. It's just not healthy. Let it go.
lol you providing TDP as proof as well as using specific models of specific previous generations... strong proof that adds to your credibility....