I'm 78 so my IT career lies far back :) I'm a pure nostalgic hobbyist now, My only server stores my 2nd backup, the 1st backup is on my laptop's 2TB HDD. The "server" is based on the remains of a 2003 HP d520 SFF with a motherboard and CPU (Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz) and 1 GB DDR (400MHz). The storage is 1.21TB consisting of 2x IDE 3.5" and 2x SATA-1 2.5". It runs 32-bits FreeBSD 13.2 on OpenZFS. Since June 2019 it receives the backup during ~1 hour per week from the desktop using ZFS "send | ssh receive".
While I'm still deep in my IT career, I also share a strong nostalgic feeling for older hardware. I regularly browse 'vintage computer' forums for classic gear! I'd love to get ahold of some of the old SGI and Alpha systems for no reason other than to put them on a shelf and look at them! ;-) Thanks for sharing your home lab!
@@Timi7007 lol we do the same, my father has a voip server that has been running on a pentium 3 desktop for the last 15 years. I have a pentium 4 HT desktop that I run a minecraft server on for friends and a athlon 64 x2 4200+ system I used to use to run various things but its been replaced by a raspberry pi since electricity is too expensive here to justify keeping it on 24/7. would like to get more stuff but my internet is too slow and power is too pricy.
this video made me think about setting up something more permanent than i've done yet. previously i never considered how constructing my very own frankenstein's monster, i will probably grow to care for it, which will inspire me to spend more time on it, which again will make me learn faster. which is my goal, learn learn learn until i understand what professional roles i enjoy and qualify for. and i'm thinking old and cheap hardware is better because it makes me learn to deal with constraints without having to spin up fifty vms just to simulate an enterprise scale load. thx to everyone for sharing their setups✌️
My entire homelab is raspberry pi 4 2 gb version with pihole, wireguard, unbound, ddns, emby, sonarr, prowlarr, transmission, and dashy. Works amazing since 2019
how does that handle 10gb internet , 40tb of storage and firewall packet sniffing? i knew someone who used a raspberry pi as well, but he still lived at home with his mommy.
Truenas Scale with Nextcloud installed on an old PC, Open Media Vault running SMB Shares, Docker & Portainer, and WinNUT on an Odriod C4 using eMMC memory, Adguard on pi3b+, Uptime-Kuma on a Pi 3b+, Home Assistant running on an Odriod C2, Reverse proxy using Cloud-Flare Tunnels. Ubuntu Server running on a virtual machine on Truenas Scale. Planning on building a beefy Proxmox server to consolidate some of my servers.
My homelab started around 7 years ago with an old HP G60 laptop with a Pentium Dual Core T4200, 4 GB of RAM, and a 320 GB HDD. At the time I was running bare-metal with Ubuntu. I currently use an IBM System x3550 M2 with dual Xeon X5570s, 44 GB of RAM, 1 120 GB SATA SSD, 1 2 TB SATA HDD, and 2 136 GB SAS HDDs. I use XCP-NG as my hypervisor, managing it with Xen Orchestra. The primary VM OS is Debian alongside some Windows 10 and Ubuntu VMs, for a total of about 12 active VMs. Don't currently have a NAS, but that is the next major purchase and project and implement. For now I use network shares from my main PC for anything I need access to from other systems, with backups being to external HDDs. My network uses a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X, 2 Ubiquiti UniFi USW-Flex-Mini swiches, and 2 Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-LR access points.
Great video and nice to hear what others are utilizing in their homelab. I have a few rackmount devices which contain my ESXi hosts, TrueNAS , and OPNSense boxes along with a Brocade switch for networking. I also have a gaming desktop which I utilize as my "homelab" as I will create a nested environment under VMware Workstation for quick build/ tear downs for testing solutions before deploying to hardware. It's also interesting to see what others utilize for hardware as I have seen laptops and even clusters with Intel NUCs! So long as it gets the job done it's fine by me!
All great for homelab/small-medium size businesses due to affordability, open source platforms, and not gatekept behind licenses for the most part. However, keep in mind for some of the consultants out there, most if not all would not be accepted as enterprise solutions for large businesses or corporate solutions due to the exact fact that they are open source and/or not supported by licensing. The licensing is key for patch support when vulnerabilities are uncovered and exploits are exposed.
My storage is backed by TrueNAS as an iSCSI mount of NVMe drives but I also have an NFS mount backed by spinning disks. You can run your VMs from any storage you like, just keep in mind that slow drives will affect your VM performance. If you can put your VMs on SSDs you’ll have a much better experience.
My Homelab consists of 3 "servers": Main Server (i7-6700 with a few HDDs and SSDs and Main-6TB-NAS-HDD), a 20€-eBay-ThinClient-Backup-Server (backs up Main-Server Proxmox-LXCs and VMs to a 2TB HDD and 6TB NAS Backup) and a Raspberry Pi 4 running Zigbee2MQTT and SmartHome-Stuff. Overall works pretty good and has relatively low power consumption of ≈24-25W (Main-Server)
last year over 2 weeks i manually deduped 34 archival hard drives into 6GB, then replicated that onto 3 hard drives. this year i updated my main server for the first time in 8 years to an amd epyc 9124, 96gb rtx4070, supermicro H13SSL-NT. I will be using it to update some of my virtualization and orchestration skills.
Active Backup is an amazing piece of software, so simple to use and yet it has every "enterprise" feature baked in, free of charge. easily the number 1 reason to go with Synology instead of their competition.
I have, though not a _complete_ restore, only a few VMs at a time. The current DS3622+ that I have is 10G-connected so it's very quick at restoring VMs.
if you get old too power hungry pro hw, you can keep in mind creating a lab which powers down most of the stuff most of the time. it's a great exercise in architecting and running an infrastructure with real world constraints.
@@2GuysTek thanks, but I would have no idea and if didn’t ask I would had thought there were issues with that solution. I am just now looking into putting something together. Would had been nice if he was joking to indicate such otherwise leads people down a wrong path
Understood. The world of networking is built on upon standards so as long as the hardware you’re working with follows those standards, they’ll typically work together without issue. We mix pfSense and UniFi together, and Tom Lawrence mentioned in his segment that he does as well. I didn’t mean to come off snooty if I did ;-)
my homelab is really boring, I use Verizon FIOS router that they gave me as a "free" item for signing up, I have a 1gb 8 port TP link switch and I use my old Intel I7 3770K, 16gb of DDR3 1333, with trueNAS for my NAS along with a mix and match of old desktop HDDs in a corsair 750D.
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
I'm 78 so my IT career lies far back :) I'm a pure nostalgic hobbyist now,
My only server stores my 2nd backup, the 1st backup is on my laptop's 2TB HDD. The "server" is based on the remains of a 2003 HP d520 SFF with a motherboard and CPU (Pentium 4 HT 3.0GHz) and 1 GB DDR (400MHz). The storage is 1.21TB consisting of 2x IDE 3.5" and 2x SATA-1 2.5". It runs 32-bits FreeBSD 13.2 on OpenZFS. Since June 2019 it receives the backup during ~1 hour per week from the desktop using ZFS "send | ssh receive".
While I'm still deep in my IT career, I also share a strong nostalgic feeling for older hardware. I regularly browse 'vintage computer' forums for classic gear! I'd love to get ahold of some of the old SGI and Alpha systems for no reason other than to put them on a shelf and look at them! ;-) Thanks for sharing your home lab!
A "production" server with 2003 hardware running ZFS is the most homelab-thing I've heard and I love it!
@@Timi7007 lol we do the same, my father has a voip server that has been running on a pentium 3 desktop for the last 15 years. I have a pentium 4 HT desktop that I run a minecraft server on for friends and a athlon 64 x2 4200+ system I used to use to run various things but its been replaced by a raspberry pi since electricity is too expensive here to justify keeping it on 24/7. would like to get more stuff but my internet is too slow and power is too pricy.
I'm not quite as old as you (mid 50's). But I appreciate how much has changed in IT since the 80's. You've seen even more. I wish you the best sir.
this video made me think about setting up something more permanent than i've done yet. previously i never considered how constructing my very own frankenstein's monster, i will probably grow to care for it, which will inspire me to spend more time on it, which again will make me learn faster. which is my goal, learn learn learn until i understand what professional roles i enjoy and qualify for. and i'm thinking old and cheap hardware is better because it makes me learn to deal with constraints without having to spin up fifty vms just to simulate an enterprise scale load. thx to everyone for sharing their setups✌️
No wrong way to homelab....but a beard is a must have :-D
Time to start a bearded IT club!
Oh… brb I have to go buy some fake beard now
I'm subscribed to all those guys... So obviously I'm following you now. Good work on the collaboration!
Outstanding!
My entire homelab is raspberry pi 4 2 gb version with pihole, wireguard, unbound, ddns, emby, sonarr, prowlarr, transmission, and dashy.
Works amazing since 2019
how does that handle 10gb internet , 40tb of storage and firewall packet sniffing? i knew someone who used a raspberry pi as well, but he still lived at home with his mommy.
@@RobertoCarlos-tn1iq lol whoa
I don't mind living with my family. Why are you bragging about having your own place when its made with shit materials?
Great, great video and colab! Thanks.
Truenas Scale with Nextcloud installed on an old PC, Open Media Vault running SMB Shares, Docker & Portainer, and WinNUT on an Odriod C4 using eMMC memory, Adguard on pi3b+, Uptime-Kuma on a Pi 3b+, Home Assistant running on an Odriod C2, Reverse proxy using Cloud-Flare Tunnels. Ubuntu Server running on a virtual machine on Truenas Scale. Planning on building a beefy Proxmox server to consolidate some of my servers.
My homelab started around 7 years ago with an old HP G60 laptop with a Pentium Dual Core T4200, 4 GB of RAM, and a 320 GB HDD. At the time I was running bare-metal with Ubuntu.
I currently use an IBM System x3550 M2 with dual Xeon X5570s, 44 GB of RAM, 1 120 GB SATA SSD, 1 2 TB SATA HDD, and 2 136 GB SAS HDDs. I use XCP-NG as my hypervisor, managing it with Xen Orchestra. The primary VM OS is Debian alongside some Windows 10 and Ubuntu VMs, for a total of about 12 active VMs.
Don't currently have a NAS, but that is the next major purchase and project and implement. For now I use network shares from my main PC for anything I need access to from other systems, with backups being to external HDDs.
My network uses a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X, 2 Ubiquiti UniFi USW-Flex-Mini swiches, and 2 Ubiquiti UniFi UAP-AC-LR access points.
Great video and nice to hear what others are utilizing in their homelab.
I have a few rackmount devices which contain my ESXi hosts, TrueNAS , and OPNSense boxes along with a Brocade switch for networking. I also have a gaming desktop which I utilize as my "homelab" as I will create a nested environment under VMware Workstation for quick build/ tear downs for testing solutions before deploying to hardware.
It's also interesting to see what others utilize for hardware as I have seen laptops and even clusters with Intel NUCs!
So long as it gets the job done it's fine by me!
8:18 What beautiful NASes!
Ha, someone had to use a not-Synology!
Great video! I am curious about how you got your Sophos firewall display panel to work with Pfsense? I have one in my home lab as well.
I go through it in the video here: ruclips.net/video/JSJt5atXblY/видео.html
All great for homelab/small-medium size businesses due to affordability, open source platforms, and not gatekept behind licenses for the most part.
However, keep in mind for some of the consultants out there, most if not all would not be accepted as enterprise solutions for large businesses or corporate solutions due to the exact fact that they are open source and/or not supported by licensing. The licensing is key for patch support when vulnerabilities are uncovered and exploits are exposed.
Hi. What drives you usually used to store/boot VMs? Can a WD blue/red is fine for VMs? Thank you.
My storage is backed by TrueNAS as an iSCSI mount of NVMe drives but I also have an NFS mount backed by spinning disks. You can run your VMs from any storage you like, just keep in mind that slow drives will affect your VM performance. If you can put your VMs on SSDs you’ll have a much better experience.
@@2GuysTek Thank you
Can you link the video on the Sophos pfsense install? I looked, but maybe I missed it?
Here it is! ruclips.net/video/JSJt5atXblY/видео.html
@@2GuysTek hot damn! Thanks!
My Homelab consists of 3 "servers": Main Server (i7-6700 with a few HDDs and SSDs and Main-6TB-NAS-HDD), a 20€-eBay-ThinClient-Backup-Server (backs up Main-Server Proxmox-LXCs and VMs to a 2TB HDD and 6TB NAS Backup) and a Raspberry Pi 4 running Zigbee2MQTT and SmartHome-Stuff.
Overall works pretty good and has relatively low power consumption of ≈24-25W (Main-Server)
last year over 2 weeks i manually deduped 34 archival hard drives into 6GB, then replicated that onto 3 hard drives.
this year i updated my main server for the first time in 8 years to an amd epyc 9124, 96gb rtx4070, supermicro H13SSL-NT. I will be using it to update some of my virtualization and orchestration skills.
Love it! Thank you for sharing!
@RaidOwl Thoughts on TrueNas virtualized vs bare metal? I'm planning my first homelab and TrueNas heavily suggests running bare metal
Active Backup is an amazing piece of software, so simple to use and yet it has every "enterprise" feature baked in, free of charge.
easily the number 1 reason to go with Synology instead of their competition.
100% I really don’t know why more people aren’t talking about it! I think we need to make a video just about it!
Only missing Hardware Haven and SPX Labs.
I guess we don't have the same definition of "homelab". Where's the soldering iron? 😅
Awesome!
Have you tested recovery from Synology backup of your stack, and how long did it take?
I have, though not a _complete_ restore, only a few VMs at a time. The current DS3622+ that I have is 10G-connected so it's very quick at restoring VMs.
The power consumption of all these "labs" are way too high for electricity prices over here.
Completely understand! We're working on more videos that include lower-powered gear for the power-savers in countries with high kW/hr!
if you get old too power hungry pro hw, you can keep in mind creating a lab which powers down most of the stuff most of the time. it's a great exercise in architecting and running an infrastructure with real world constraints.
Haha snowflakes like my cpu after a old laptop refit!
oh, i see.
Now you see! ;-)
Why is mixing pfsense and UniFi is bad?
It's not, that's how we run. pfSense is at the edge, Unifi is wifi and switching.
@@2GuysTek But RaidOwl said pfsense and UniFi is a big no no, I don't understand.
He’s joking.
@@2GuysTek thanks, but I would have no idea and if didn’t ask I would had thought there were issues with that solution. I am just now looking into putting something together. Would had been nice if he was joking to indicate such otherwise leads people down a wrong path
Understood. The world of networking is built on upon standards so as long as the hardware you’re working with follows those standards, they’ll typically work together without issue. We mix pfSense and UniFi together, and Tom Lawrence mentioned in his segment that he does as well. I didn’t mean to come off snooty if I did ;-)
my homelab is really boring, I use Verizon FIOS router that they gave me as a "free" item for signing up, I have a 1gb 8 port TP link switch and I use my old Intel I7 3770K, 16gb of DDR3 1333, with trueNAS for my NAS along with a mix and match of old desktop HDDs in a corsair 750D.
There’s no shame in that! If it’s getting the job done it’s perfect!
Tom being a shill for pfSense.
hmm, nothing shocking, all pretty standard stuff.
using Synology, Terra Master, and other Nas workstations they all listen to you