I first came across this video seven years ago, when I was just starting out. I thought to myself, am I sure I want to go down this path...... It popped up in my feed again, and what a difference seven years makes. This time watching through I thought I'd write a comment and say this time I understood everything you were saying, and have a very comparable homelab set up now (with a bit newer gen Dells) Thanks for the video. Hope you're doing well!
This is such a well done video. So many tech videos on youtube are unwatchable garbage. Even if the person speaking is an expert the quality of the editing, shooting, sound, or preparation of the script is often just horrible. I can't commend you enough for such a well done video.
Very articulate, unbiased, informed, and loaded with good suggestions. This is a high quality video that had me nodding at sections I was experienced with and taking notes at sections I'm not. Thanks for the excellent content.
How to homelab properly in cold environments (for folks who have winters and live north). 1. Buy a house with a basement 2. Build your homelab in the basement. 3. Heat rises, since your lab is in the basement, you are doing labs and heating your house. 4. Profit (no really, but maximizing effectiveness and saving money).
you run your setup anyways -> you use power anyways -> running it inside your own house heats you house little bit -> less need to heat house -> saved money/resources
Verified this works in a townhome with temp sensors in every room/hallway. Basement not required. Gaming PCs drawing +500W total system power convert most of that current into heat...(set OS to disable sleep/hibernate and activate performance mode)Rooms with computers in them are minimum +10°F/5°C, up to +17°F/8°C (@300W idle draw)
i have a 1600 sq foot basement and my "home office" still causes the basement to over heat in the summer. I live charlotte, nc area and the windows are cold, but summers put the basement (with everything off 70-80F, I'm seriously considering adding a split duct system after watching this though.
This is probably the best video explaining why nobody does on prem anymore. It's all about the cloud today. Seriously though, it's a fantastic way to explore all the options that you'll never have to configure in real life. I've deployed hundreds of data centers for medium to large businesses. What used to take me a month or more, I can now do in a couple of weeks in Azure or AWS, and I don't have to wait for bare metal to ship. Logistics these days are the limiting factor, not IT knowledge. Even the most hardened health care data centers I've deployed use templates that are certified by regulatory agencies.
Wow, great video! Detailed, concise and nicely implemented. Couldn't agree more on doing the setup yourself and your own "bookshelf" concept. You don't learn anything on the setup by paying Google to host a temporary vm. You have to watch and maintain, possibly upgrade the setup just like a typical corporate environment. It is a must for true network guys. Kudos to you!
love this video, this guy really knows what he wants and how to get there. your setup is elegant. the only thing I doubt about is the power socket on the wall directly under the aircon. in most case, aircon will not be leaking water, in most case.
For those starting out like me, don't give up, most of this stuff is over my head, however with time and persistence we will be at his level. Sending you good vibes 💯💯💯💯💯
OMG you are an expert ! thanks for sharing all your tech , love to see all you build ! I did Disaster Recovies in a HP Lorry for 4 years , remind me that times ! Cheers
Fantastic presentation and lesson on the home lab!! I hold the very same attitude about finding ways to gain experience in equipment I want to work with professionally by first playing with it at home. Fiber Ninja approved!!
I build my home-lab based on Dell Precision Workstations, they are very much stable, quiet as well and very powerful. I recently purchased T5810 which can support upto 256GB ram and that will help me to assign enough memories to virtual hosts. Because in virtualization memory is very important than CPU ;) , i used to run out of memories but cpu was always available. Good luck guys.
Even now, used Dell power Edge servers offer serious value for some one on a budget. I recreantly purchased a Dell R720XD for $450 US without storage and only had 32 gigs of ram. Since DDR3 ECC is dirt cheap, 192 gigabytes and three surveillance drives later, It purrs like a kitten. Since I'm space constrained where I live, my server rack is in my office next to my desk. The air conditioner is louder than my server rack. So far in the rack I have a 4U 20 bay home built media server, a 4U home built threadripper workstation, and a Dell power edge R720XD running blue iris. I'm currently saving for a R820 to run VM's on. I'm not in the IT field. Playing with servers is just a fun hobby. Switching duties are handled by an Aruba S2500 POE+. It has 4 10gb SFP+ ports and 48 1gb POE+ ports.
thanks for the inspiration. you're obviously an awesome guy and i greatly appreciate you taking the time to explain concept of a home lab thoroughly. stay clean - matt
I really enjoyed the video. Thanks for the car seat install video on your other channel too! 2 random searches over the past 3 months and you helped me out twice lol.
Very nice home lab! Mine is quite similar, with an R710 and a T620 in a vSphere cluster. Additional servers for new ESXi releases, etc. Synology back-end, like you. DiskStation DS3615xs with 10x6TB drives and 2x512GB SSDs as cache. The biggest difference here is that servers and primary storage are on a 10Gb Ethernet network using simple UTP cabling and a Netgear 10G switch. The DiskStation also serves the home network, in regard to file shares and some backup functions, including replication to a Synology DS210j. Offsite backup is managed from a physical server (an Intel NUC) with an 8TB staging drive attached. Crashplan provides the means and is always running in the background. vSphere 6 (ESXi) is the primary hypervisor environment, but Hyper-V, XenServer, and virtual ESXi servers run under that. My domain controllers/DNS/DHCP servers and other management servers run on the same nodes as test and experimental VMs. I general keep either the R710 or T620 up with a full load (both machines are well configured), rarely running them both due to energy consumption costs, but when both are running, they are load-balanced, and live migration of VMs between them (vMotion) is available and automatic. Management of the hosts is via iDRAC Enterprise and the old vSphere Windows Client. Management of the VMs is mostly via the vSphere Web client. vSphere Replication is configured and available to keep a copy of a VM on a second host in case the primary copy fails. Fault tolerance and High Availability are also available. VMware Horizon Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is set up to create virtual desktops, linked-clones and instant clones and a virtual second site allows the use of Horizon's Cloud Pod Architecture. The current environment is the result of nearly a decade of acquisition, configuration, tuning, and learning. All in all, it just works.
You nailed it. One thing a lot of people miss out when watching this is how long it takes to acquire it all. It takes several years to scrape all this together and you learn a lot during that process.
Power in the US is quite a contrast, most UK homes have 13A outlets(240V) on 32A circuits, so you can easily pull 6KW plus into any bedroom if you so wish!
@@samin90 went over your head. They do no extra work. Plug and play. Sure in the US you can easily wire it up, if you know what you're doing. Or pay. Completely irrelevant.
Love this video, I would love to see you go into depth about your home office server and demonstrate how to set up one that is similar. I love the R710 price point and will be suggesting them to my dad to start the server for his home-based office.
I am a oldschool sysadmin/engineer, but these days my homelab is running on a few laptops and a HP microserver and a simple TP-Link router. Quite cheap, quiet and energy friendly. And I even don't need UPSes to protect my data :-) I really do like the setup you invested in, but this is a setup you would normally see in a small office :-)
Great video! Inspiring! You've certainly given me some interesting perspectives on "investing" into your lab, as opposed to feeling pressured to have everything at once.
Very nice video, when I found an ad for an R710 with some ram and two xeons I couldn't let it go, for only 170€ with a 24 port gigabyte switch was a very sweet deal, now I'm running 5 VMs 24/7, including my personal pc (yup, I bought I frickin server while I didn't have a pc), and some self hosted services, the workhorse you can get from some old servers is just amazing, a setup I have with my R710 that today have reached 500€ for a pc would have cost more that 1k!
I'm just starting building my home lab based on a Dell R710, cheapo Chenbro server to basically run Win10 and an IBM x3650 with a few decommisioned machines from work. Very much work in progress at the moment, but I'm really interested in blocking ads at the network layer rather than higher up the stack which is something I need to look into more. I'm probably going to get my arse kicked by my partner when se sees this little lot properly take shape, but if she gets some benefits (i.e. ad-free browsing) I think I can bring her around :) Thanks very much for the tour of your home lab, and the heads-up on pfSense!
Thankyou for actually explaining tNice tutorialngs. Other videos that I watched started talking about how to make soft and didn't ntion anytNice tutorialng
Very nice lab and an awesome rack. Nice presentation style and editing. I moved my two 32TB Nas4Free Xeon Quad servers with 32GB of memory to the basement, my loud window air conditioner couldn't handle them. I have an alarm mounted on mine if any one tries to kick it in. Still trying to master XEN virtual servers. Also, have a ton of cloud storage and on-demand computing power. The cloud is my friend. Keep broadcasting!
Really cool, i took 3 years to create my home lab, and i am happy that i created a very similar home lab. Great job. I invested a lot of money here in Brazil, but i agree it´s a investment that opens many opportunities. If you pay for official training you would spend a lot more money, with a laboratories like this I can study whatever I want for as long as I want.
Excellent, video. Inspired by it. Love the information on the Dell servers. Would love more on the Virtualization. My big concern, is power. I have a smaller home lab and constantly popping the breakers. Plus, heat is a major problem. Great video. Again. Would love to see more on Virtualization.
Resistors on those fan leads will also cut the noise level considerably. I bought an old 2U Dell server a couple years back, threw resistors on the fans; noise levels dropped probably 60%, I monitored the temps constantly, never went above 75C. A/C did play a part in the low temps, though.
The HP Proliant DL360 G7 is a great alternative, its quiet, dual sockets and can have up to 6 cores each with a ton of capacity for memory plus 8x2.5" drive slots. You can find some on eBay for around $300.
It is such an overkill for a "lab". Labs typically don't need performance, so you can built a whole network from virtual machines running inside one physical machine. It is a great system, but in case some viewer wondering, no you don't need that much money and space for learning infrastructure.
Man Zoltan, I should have bumped into you a year ago ... y'know, before my home lab took up 3x 36U of space and required two 30A 220v circuits. I probably should have stopped when I could still hear the doorbell over the fan noise. ... I might still have a front room... and perhaps even a GF ; )
@@LannisterFromDaRock I kinda agree, but still... Zoltan's right. A single modern machine can run a LOT of VM's. For example, a cheapish Dell 820 takes up to four e5 series Xeon processors and has 48 DDR3 RDIMM/LRDIMM memory slots !!! So, even with the cheaper end of the E5-46xx series Xeons a 32 core machine with up to 1.5TB of ram is possible in a cheap second-hand box - and you can drop a hypervisor on the twin internal SDRAM to keep things slim. That's 384GB per processor or 48GB per core over 32 machines. More than enough for a home cluster. Less than £500 for 32 cores with 4-6GB each? I'd call that a bargain. Of course, if you're studying clouds you might need two - that's the minimum to do live migration and explore the topology options ... but then that's 64 cores and it's really not very likely a home lab needs anywhere near as much VM as that! So, you'd probably still be able to get away with splitting the four cores across the two boxes if you REALLY wanted more metal. And if you occassionally DO require huge resources? Then fire up vCPU instances on Amazon, Vultr or any one of 100 other commercial clouds and pay just pennies an hour... and only for the times they're actually up. Hell, commercial virtualisation is usually worth it just for the electricity savings alone. So, no... you really don't need much (or, even any) metal for a home lab... unless of course, it's a networking lab. For example, when studying for the Cisco CCNP/CCIE or similar. I did my CCIE and the amount of equipment I ended up using was insane, but I bought mid-spec second-hand and recouped most of the money at resale... about 70% ish. Today you have GNS3, so extending a few bits of the most basic kit using virtualised environments such as GNS3 for studying larger topologies, can help keep your actual metal to a bare minimum. And that's why I can only 'kinda' agree with you. I struggle to find a home lab use-case that requires anything too major or which cannot be completely pushed off to a commercial cloud far cheaper. To be honest, you'd actually need to be grinding data all day for months to require a proper home cluster, and that's only likely in the field of crypto or render farming. Regardless, I think it's fair to say that most people who build meaty home labs tend to find them massively underutilised and wishing they'd gone smaller. There is a natural tendancy to overestimate... or, maybe, it's just the collector bug. If you buy a 40U rack, you're likely going to feel the desire to fill it : / But I'd advise anyone building a home lab to begin with with a couple of items of small (but punchy) second-hand kit and avoid buying more metal until it's explicitly suggested by a serious use-case... even then, ask yourself, will I still need that extra capacity in a month? Usually, the answer is no. Luckily, I actually DO use all of mine, but I cannot tell you why ; )
@@garychap8384 Woahhh thanks for the very detailed answer. I'll definitely look into the Dell R820. To be honest I have my workstation machine running 24/7 parsing PDF files (Lenovo D30 with 2 x E5-2689 and 256 GB RAM) and I always feel that more power would be very handy. :) The RAM is eaten up by Elasticsearch quite quickly when you have millions of PDFs and the CPU is hovering around 70-90% utilization. However, I'm more into distributed systems/microservices and programming and not strictly homelab.
@@LannisterFromDaRock Nice setup, those 2689's sure can chew through data : ))) And PDF's eh? How unusual! The sheer variety of things people are doing at home now never ceases to amaze me. All round that D30 is a very punchy little workstation, especially if you throw GPU workloads into the mix, but I find the poor memory architecture lets them down somewhat and leaves the CPUs rather bottlenecked and gasping. Sure, they can reach 512GB at a huge premium (fewer/bigger chunks) but then don't really have anywhere near enough memory channels to get the most out of it. As for r820's ... I'm actually using the blade variant (m820 and m820HD) in multiple (9) m1000e chassis, but it's certainly a powerful platform, even in blade format... and when you start compiling for distributed execution under Mosix or on vanilla PVM/MPi, the sheer power you can squeeze from m1000e based clusters built on the 820 architecture is truly frightening (although, not nearly as frightening as the self-test fan noise) I think I mentioned above, a single 820 has 48 DIMM Sots, 12 per processor for 1-4 processors of e5-46xx. So getting to, say, 256 is cheaper and results in a far wider interface that doesn't choke so easily when your processors start demanding max IOPS. But some odd things happen to individual channel speeds when you have that many channels... the aggregate bus bandwidth still goes up, but the individual memory channel speeds will go down significantly. You probably won't have run into this, certainly not on a D30, but a lot of people get worried that the memory channel speed can drop to a measly 800mhz once you're fully populated. They can feel a bit cheated. But the data striping and excessive number of memory channels opened up per processor more than makes up for it in sheer bus width. And... if you know that's where you're going when you start the build - you can save a LOT of money on the cheaper memory. I found that making the early decision to go wide, as opposed to fast and narrow, can have a significant impact on cost when building for performance. But yes, it sounds like your system is probably just a little RAM-bound. And unfortunately, thats one of the few problems with the alternative of spinning up endless commercial instances, they do tend to be light on RAM - and if you're needing 24/7 instead of a few hours each evening then the price starts making home metal look very attractive. So, I totally get why you said "It depends" ... from the sounds of it you do seem to have one of those unusual use cases. I won't pry, but it sounds like you're doing some interesting things over there : ) Anyway, always nice to meet a fellow lunatic XD
Excellent video, and thank you for listing all of your gear on your techthoughts.info site. I recently bought a Dell R810, and I was looking for a rack to put it in. I'm not an IT guy, so I really didn't know where to look. And the prices for racks that I did find were way too high. The StarTech looks perfect for the job. Thanks! I'm a Controls Engineer, so my needs are mostly limited to setting up a few VMs (which is what led me here), so I can run some of our woefully outdated software (I still have to use DOS and ANSI.SYS upon occasion).
The Dell PowerEdge C6100 is also a good cheap server option, for as low as 200£ you can get a 4 node model each with 2 xeon quad cores and 8 GB of ram, if you fully spec it out it really could be a beast
@@knarfweasel Complete hunk of junk. Borderline useless. Mail server, ftp maybe. I wouldn't do anything important with them. Transcoding anything modern would be a disaster. Probably not even good from a "leave this running all the time so I don't have to run servers on my main PC and save power" standpoint. Just useless.
damn.. this sh*t is awesome.... not planning to spend that much money as you did, but very helpful insights about storage and networking.. great video!
Another fantastic server option is the HP ProLiant series. I got a LFF DL360e G8 off eBay with dual Xeon E5-2440 CPUs and 64GB RAM for 439 bucks SHIPPED!! You can find SCREAMIN deals on Newegg and eBay when it comes to servers. I'm going to upgrade the CPUs as these are somewhat feeble, but it's running unRAID just fine and, for the money? Sheeeeeit...can't beat it!!
Maugh0372 I'm married with a few kids, they play with the lab too. you should try to leave work at work but don't leave your passion for technology or curiosity to tinker around there. Engaging your home lab even for non work related things can still lead to good career outcomes.
Nice Lab However, a bit old-school to me. I do the very same (use my machine as a virtualization lab). But instead of running a bunch of machines, I use on fat machine and nested virtualization. Currently, it's a z840 with 2 20core E5-2698 V4 haswells and 256gig of memory. The CPUs are actually QS models (E5-2673) but are function-complete and the same model/stepping as the production ones. REAL E5-2698's are prohibitively expensive. But with some clever shopping on Ebay&friends, you can assemble such a box for roughly the price of your rack setup. I use Fedora as OS with kvm as L0 hypervisor. The Haswells have all the new nifty features you want, like APIC-V, VMCS shadowing and posted interrupts (if you pass HW to your vm's, L1 hypevisors). Consider these features your baseline for nested virt, thats why any system older that haswell will not excel at nested virt. On top of the normal Fedora desktop OS, I run full OpenShift container cloud infrastructures, as well as an OpenStack setup, all with Xen or KVM Nova nodes as L1 hypervisors. They even run their own guests. Networking-wise, I normally use tagged VLANs in bridges, for simple setup, but eventually poke around with openvswitch, if special network setups are required. If have loosely tested ESXI as L1 hypervisor and it seems to work fine, as I am running a cluster of netapp-simulators (for training) ontop of them. I did not test HyperV. That setup gives a lot of benefits. First of all, you essentially run a single machine. That consumes considerably less power, is started up and shut down faster ( no need to have it running 24/7). In addition to the box, I run a dedicated firewall/router behing my cablemodem (with fixed IPv4), permitting external access via jumphost. That router also provides DNS and DHCP. For any external-exposed services, such as mail or webserver, I use cheap external vservers. Sure, the setup is a bit extreme and very expensive, considering your paying it all for one machine, but if you are a professional, it should be within your budget. The flexibility is enourmous, as you can literally use 80 assignable threads as cores for VMs. All with a single, large RAM space. And best of all, the z840 is very silent, pefectly suitable for a homeoffice. And even in hot summers, I do not need an air condition. At almost 30 eurocents per kwh here in Germany, the savings in power are enormous. And the flexibility to experiment with entire infrastructures within just the one machine you use for work, really boosts productivity.
I agree this was a great video. I will be diving into your catalog more to hopefully find more of your settings on the software side. I am fortunate enough to have this type of setup at work, separate from my production VMs that I can test and play with. I am looking into a larger scale Hyper-V setup coming from my XenServer setup that I am using in production.
Great video! Thanks for sharing. Definitely a lot of great information. I myself am in the process of putting together a home lab. I am trying to study for the Microsoft Cert. After watching this I am inspired.
Cool video. Could you make a video to explain how you are using pfSense? I want to learn about firewalls and networking, but I don't want to mess up my existing home network.
Great video, great production... subscribed. :-) I personally run 2x R610, 1x R710. and just picked up a C6100 to hopefully replace it all. A couple X5675's should do the trick.
Wow! What a setup! I'm a bit like you, I like to have my own hardware. But frankly speaking, this level of hardware and this level of investment is no longer necessary since you can hookup to cloud service providers and pay only what you use. You can have a mixed network with some severs of yours being local and some being in the cloud or you can go 100% in the cloud. It's your choice. I have 8 servers that I built on the cheap, usually purchased from video game geeks upgrading to latest and greatest. But for serious deployment, I use cloud service providers, which come to much cheaper on the long run.
I first came across this video seven years ago, when I was just starting out. I thought to myself, am I sure I want to go down this path...... It popped up in my feed again, and what a difference seven years makes. This time watching through I thought I'd write a comment and say this time I understood everything you were saying, and have a very comparable homelab set up now (with a bit newer gen Dells) Thanks for the video. Hope you're doing well!
This is such a well done video. So many tech videos on youtube are unwatchable garbage. Even if the person speaking is an expert the quality of the editing, shooting, sound, or preparation of the script is often just horrible. I can't commend you enough for such a well done video.
TheNetworkingStudy More than half have an Indian accent which I can't ignore.
So true, this guy totally knocks this video out of the park. Great stuff
can't agree enough, one of the most bull shit free guides on youtube
This is take care of old servers and re used for New tech, its perferct
Home Lab? Not even my Workplace has such a powerful array of techy goodness lol. Very well done sir!
Very articulate, unbiased, informed, and loaded with good suggestions. This is a high quality video that had me nodding at sections I was experienced with and taking notes at sections I'm not. Thanks for the excellent content.
How to homelab properly in cold environments (for folks who have winters and live north).
1. Buy a house with a basement
2. Build your homelab in the basement.
3. Heat rises, since your lab is in the basement, you are doing labs and heating your house.
4. Profit (no really, but maximizing effectiveness and saving money).
David G you mean profit for the electric company.
you run your setup anyways -> you use power anyways -> running it inside your own house heats you house little bit -> less need to heat house -> saved money/resources
Verified this works in a townhome with temp sensors in every room/hallway. Basement not required. Gaming PCs drawing +500W total system power convert most of that current into heat...(set OS to disable sleep/hibernate and activate performance mode)Rooms with computers in them are minimum +10°F/5°C, up to +17°F/8°C (@300W idle draw)
i have a 1600 sq foot basement and my "home office" still causes the basement to over heat in the summer. I live charlotte, nc area and the windows are cold, but summers put the basement (with everything off 70-80F, I'm seriously considering adding a split duct system after watching this though.
no... when there is some flood your servers drown
Way more than what I need but this is probably the best 'intro to homelabs' video that I've seen on YT---good job!!!
Well Done Video, Awesome Home Lab - I am a 20+ year IT professional and I can tell you that I am extremely jealous!!!!!!! So Awesome!
great video to get people who haven't fully decided on which direction they will take in their tech journey or career, surely made me think.
man this guy so cool and humble. I subscribed immediately without any prompting.
This is probably the best video explaining why nobody does on prem anymore. It's all about the cloud today. Seriously though, it's a fantastic way to explore all the options that you'll never have to configure in real life. I've deployed hundreds of data centers for medium to large businesses. What used to take me a month or more, I can now do in a couple of weeks in Azure or AWS, and I don't have to wait for bare metal to ship. Logistics these days are the limiting factor, not IT knowledge. Even the most hardened health care data centers I've deployed use templates that are certified by regulatory agencies.
the first ever home lab on youtube with real air con!!! good work
Nice and thorough. I would strongly recommend moving that wireless section in the rack to the top and away from any metal close by.
Wow, great video! Detailed, concise and nicely implemented. Couldn't agree more on doing the setup yourself and your own "bookshelf" concept. You don't learn anything on the setup by paying Google to host a temporary vm. You have to watch and maintain, possibly upgrade the setup just like a typical corporate environment. It is a must for true network guys. Kudos to you!
Great advice. I like how started and ended with the book shelf. Well done sir.
Thanks for watching
Thx for the straightforward talk, lots of those videos try to promote various approaches and products, I found your insightful and honest.
Still use you for reference.
This video is great and you are an inspiration.
love this video, this guy really knows what he wants and how to get there.
your setup is elegant. the only thing I doubt about is the power socket on the wall directly under the aircon.
in most case, aircon will not be leaking water, in most case.
From One Tech Guy to Another !! Great Job Sir!!!
For those starting out like me, don't give up, most of this stuff is over my head, however with time and persistence we will be at his level. Sending you good vibes 💯💯💯💯💯
OMG you are an expert ! thanks for sharing all your tech , love to see all you build ! I did Disaster Recovies in a HP Lorry for 4 years , remind me that times ! Cheers
possibly the best home lab video ever made.Thank you for sharing!
Fantastic presentation and lesson on the home lab!! I hold the very same attitude about finding ways to gain experience in equipment I want to work with professionally by first playing with it at home. Fiber Ninja approved!!
Another good RUclipsr here!
I build my home-lab based on Dell Precision Workstations, they are very much stable, quiet as well and very powerful. I recently purchased T5810 which can support upto 256GB ram and that will help me to assign enough memories to virtual hosts. Because in virtualization memory is very important than CPU ;) , i used to run out of memories but cpu was always available. Good luck guys.
Even now, used Dell power Edge servers offer serious value for some one on a budget. I recreantly purchased a Dell R720XD for $450 US without storage and only had 32 gigs of ram. Since DDR3 ECC is dirt cheap, 192 gigabytes and three surveillance drives later, It purrs like a kitten. Since I'm space constrained where I live, my server rack is in my office next to my desk. The air conditioner is louder than my server rack. So far in the rack I have a 4U 20 bay home built media server, a 4U home built threadripper workstation, and a Dell power edge R720XD running blue iris. I'm currently saving for a R820 to run VM's on. I'm not in the IT field. Playing with servers is just a fun hobby. Switching duties are handled by an Aruba S2500 POE+. It has 4 10gb SFP+ ports and 48 1gb POE+ ports.
thanks for the inspiration. you're obviously an awesome guy and i greatly appreciate you taking the time to explain concept of a home lab thoroughly. stay clean - matt
I really enjoyed the video. Thanks for the car seat install video on your other channel too! 2 random searches over the past 3 months and you helped me out twice lol.
What an amazing video. Very well done. Thank you man 👌
Excellent video. Very thorough with great attention to detail. I look forward to seeing what else you share.
this is an excellent video. will run though this a couple of time to let it sink in.
Very nice home lab! Mine is quite similar, with an R710 and a T620 in a vSphere cluster. Additional servers for new ESXi releases, etc. Synology back-end, like you. DiskStation DS3615xs with 10x6TB drives and 2x512GB SSDs as cache. The biggest difference here is that servers and primary storage are on a 10Gb Ethernet network using simple UTP cabling and a Netgear 10G switch.
The DiskStation also serves the home network, in regard to file shares and some backup functions, including replication to a Synology DS210j. Offsite backup is managed from a physical server (an Intel NUC) with an 8TB staging drive attached. Crashplan provides the means and is always running in the background.
vSphere 6 (ESXi) is the primary hypervisor environment, but Hyper-V, XenServer, and virtual ESXi servers run under that.
My domain controllers/DNS/DHCP servers and other management servers run on the same nodes as test and experimental VMs. I general keep either the R710 or T620 up with a full load (both machines are well configured), rarely running them both due to energy consumption costs, but when both are running, they are load-balanced, and live migration of VMs between them (vMotion) is available and automatic.
Management of the hosts is via iDRAC Enterprise and the old vSphere Windows Client. Management of the VMs is mostly via the vSphere Web client. vSphere Replication is configured and available to keep a copy of a VM on a second host in case the primary copy fails. Fault tolerance and High Availability are also available.
VMware Horizon Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is set up to create virtual desktops, linked-clones and instant clones and a virtual second site allows the use of Horizon's Cloud Pod Architecture.
The current environment is the result of nearly a decade of acquisition, configuration, tuning, and learning.
All in all, it just works.
You nailed it. One thing a lot of people miss out when watching this is how long it takes to acquire it all. It takes several years to scrape all this together and you learn a lot during that process.
I've got a single R710. It is a great rig, I intend to get a second one soon.
Power in the US is quite a contrast, most UK homes have 13A outlets(240V) on 32A circuits, so you can easily pull 6KW plus into any bedroom if you so wish!
That's Amazing Power!
Same in Turkey. Except we have 230V.
Yeah but we use split phase electric power. Isn't all that hard to hook up 2 hot wires to get a 240 volt outlet, obviously in a NEMA 14 outlet
@@samin90 went over your head. They do no extra work. Plug and play. Sure in the US you can easily wire it up, if you know what you're doing. Or pay. Completely irrelevant.
You should be a professional presenter! A f..king PLUS A++++
Love this video, I would love to see you go into depth about your home office server and demonstrate how to set up one that is similar. I love the R710 price point and will be suggesting them to my dad to start the server for his home-based office.
Such a well done tech video on virtualization! This was very informative and clearly explained! Thank you!
love the minisplit. Very nice units and very efficient
Bro... Amazing. Really well done, both the lab and the video. Hats off!
Nice man. I can see your channel becoming huge with quality videos like this one.
I am a oldschool sysadmin/engineer, but these days my homelab is running on a few laptops and a HP microserver and a simple TP-Link router. Quite cheap, quiet and energy friendly. And I even don't need UPSes to protect my data :-) I really do like the setup you invested in, but this is a setup you would normally see in a small office :-)
great video! love how you cover everything and touched all the main points. best I've seen
couldn't have said it better myself. great points!
All I have to say is wow, Great video! Keep them coming
Fantastic video, very informative and easy to follow. Definitely going to steal some of your ideas in my own homelab setup.
Great video! Inspiring! You've certainly given me some interesting perspectives on "investing" into your lab, as opposed to feeling pressured to have everything at once.
Very nice video, when I found an ad for an R710 with some ram and two xeons I couldn't let it go, for only 170€ with a 24 port gigabyte switch was a very sweet deal, now I'm running 5 VMs 24/7, including my personal pc (yup, I bought I frickin server while I didn't have a pc), and some self hosted services, the workhorse you can get from some old servers is just amazing, a setup I have with my R710 that today have reached 500€ for a pc would have cost more that 1k!
Dude! First time seeing your videos, I have to say; it's a well think beautiful home lab. Kudos to you 👍.
I'm just starting building my home lab based on a Dell R710, cheapo Chenbro server to basically run Win10 and an IBM x3650 with a few decommisioned machines from work. Very much work in progress at the moment, but I'm really interested in blocking ads at the network layer rather than higher up the stack which is something I need to look into more. I'm probably going to get my arse kicked by my partner when se sees this little lot properly take shape, but if she gets some benefits (i.e. ad-free browsing) I think I can bring her around :)
Thanks very much for the tour of your home lab, and the heads-up on pfSense!
Thankyou for actually explaining tNice tutorialngs. Other videos that I watched started talking about how to make soft and didn't ntion anytNice tutorialng
His home lab is better then most of our clients whole offices.
Top video mate, honest with no nonsense!
Very nice lab and an awesome rack. Nice presentation style and editing. I moved my two 32TB Nas4Free Xeon Quad servers with 32GB of memory to the basement, my loud window air conditioner couldn't handle them. I have an alarm mounted on mine if any one tries to kick it in. Still trying to master XEN virtual servers. Also, have a ton of cloud storage and on-demand computing power. The cloud is my friend. Keep broadcasting!
"It isn't perfect" Best joke in the whole video haha
True dat
dilutedspine i
dilutedspine xmkw
For us Techies, it's never perfect but we'll always wanna show it off to whomever will /Listen.
Really cool, i took 3 years to create my home lab, and i am happy that i created a very similar home lab. Great job. I invested a lot of money here in Brazil, but i agree it´s a investment that opens many opportunities. If you pay for official training you would spend a lot more money, with a laboratories like this I can study whatever I want for as long as I want.
Really good beats mine i got 2x R620s and an R720. No AC means on a hot day it gets LOUD.
Outstanding, nice snowflake and well described!
Excellent, video. Inspired by it. Love the information on the Dell servers. Would love more on the Virtualization. My big concern, is power. I have a smaller home lab and constantly popping the breakers. Plus, heat is a major problem. Great video. Again. Would love to see more on Virtualization.
So much hardware, so much fun
Within the first 30 seconds I learned that I am special like a snowflake! Thanks Mom!
Excellent vid!
Resistors on those fan leads will also cut the noise level considerably. I bought an old 2U Dell server a couple years back, threw resistors on the fans; noise levels dropped probably 60%, I monitored the temps constantly, never went above 75C. A/C did play a part in the low temps, though.
Very well done!
Surprised no FreeNAS Built box, great content none the less
Thanks for the great ideals. Taking A+ exam soon. Interested in building home lab. Video was very helpful.
The HP Proliant DL360 G7 is a great alternative, its quiet, dual sockets and can have up to 6 cores each with a ton of capacity for memory plus 8x2.5" drive slots. You can find some on eBay for around $300.
Really good video, so thorough and as a few others have said, great voice
so you are using synology ISCSI as storage. cool stuff.
Correct.
Very nicely done video and easy to follow, thank you.
It is such an overkill for a "lab". Labs typically don't need performance, so you can built a whole network from virtual machines running inside one physical machine.
It is a great system, but in case some viewer wondering, no you don't need that much money and space for learning infrastructure.
Man Zoltan, I should have bumped into you a year ago ... y'know, before my home lab took up 3x 36U of space and required two 30A 220v circuits. I probably should have stopped when I could still hear the doorbell over the fan noise.
... I might still have a front room... and perhaps even a GF ; )
It highly depends on your usecase.
@@LannisterFromDaRock I kinda agree, but still...
Zoltan's right. A single modern machine can run a LOT of VM's. For example, a cheapish Dell 820 takes up to four e5 series Xeon processors and has 48 DDR3 RDIMM/LRDIMM memory slots !!!
So, even with the cheaper end of the E5-46xx series Xeons a 32 core machine with up to 1.5TB of ram is possible in a cheap second-hand box - and you can drop a hypervisor on the twin internal SDRAM to keep things slim.
That's 384GB per processor or 48GB per core over 32 machines. More than enough for a home cluster. Less than £500 for 32 cores with 4-6GB each? I'd call that a bargain.
Of course, if you're studying clouds you might need two - that's the minimum to do live migration and explore the topology options ... but then that's 64 cores and it's really not very likely a home lab needs anywhere near as much VM as that!
So, you'd probably still be able to get away with splitting the four cores across the two boxes if you REALLY wanted more metal.
And if you occassionally DO require huge resources? Then fire up vCPU instances on Amazon, Vultr or any one of 100 other commercial clouds and pay just pennies an hour... and only for the times they're actually up.
Hell, commercial virtualisation is usually worth it just for the electricity savings alone.
So, no... you really don't need much (or, even any) metal for a home lab... unless of course, it's a networking lab. For example, when studying for the Cisco CCNP/CCIE or similar.
I did my CCIE and the amount of equipment I ended up using was insane, but I bought mid-spec second-hand and recouped most of the money at resale... about 70% ish.
Today you have GNS3, so extending a few bits of the most basic kit using virtualised environments such as GNS3 for studying larger topologies, can help keep your actual metal to a bare minimum.
And that's why I can only 'kinda' agree with you. I struggle to find a home lab use-case that requires anything too major or which cannot be completely pushed off to a commercial cloud far cheaper.
To be honest, you'd actually need to be grinding data all day for months to require a proper home cluster, and that's only likely in the field of crypto or render farming.
Regardless, I think it's fair to say that most people who build meaty home labs tend to find them massively underutilised and wishing they'd gone smaller. There is a natural tendancy to overestimate... or, maybe, it's just the collector bug. If you buy a 40U rack, you're likely going to feel the desire to fill it : /
But I'd advise anyone building a home lab to begin with with a couple of items of small (but punchy) second-hand kit and avoid buying more metal until it's explicitly suggested by a serious use-case... even then, ask yourself, will I still need that extra capacity in a month?
Usually, the answer is no.
Luckily, I actually DO use all of mine, but I cannot tell you why ; )
@@garychap8384 Woahhh thanks for the very detailed answer. I'll definitely look into the Dell R820.
To be honest I have my workstation machine running 24/7 parsing PDF files (Lenovo D30 with 2 x E5-2689 and 256 GB RAM) and I always feel that more power would be very handy. :)
The RAM is eaten up by Elasticsearch quite quickly when you have millions of PDFs and the CPU is hovering around 70-90% utilization.
However, I'm more into distributed systems/microservices and programming and not strictly homelab.
@@LannisterFromDaRock Nice setup, those 2689's sure can chew through data : )))
And PDF's eh? How unusual! The sheer variety of things people are doing at home now never ceases to amaze me.
All round that D30 is a very punchy little workstation, especially if you throw GPU workloads into the mix, but I find the poor memory architecture lets them down somewhat and leaves the CPUs rather bottlenecked and gasping. Sure, they can reach 512GB at a huge premium (fewer/bigger chunks) but then don't really have anywhere near enough memory channels to get the most out of it.
As for r820's ... I'm actually using the blade variant (m820 and m820HD) in multiple (9) m1000e chassis, but it's certainly a powerful platform, even in blade format... and when you start compiling for distributed execution under Mosix or on vanilla PVM/MPi, the sheer power you can squeeze from m1000e based clusters built on the 820 architecture is truly frightening (although, not nearly as frightening as the self-test fan noise)
I think I mentioned above, a single 820 has 48 DIMM Sots, 12 per processor for 1-4 processors of e5-46xx. So getting to, say, 256 is cheaper and results in a far wider interface that doesn't choke so easily when your processors start demanding max IOPS. But some odd things happen to individual channel speeds when you have that many channels... the aggregate bus bandwidth still goes up, but the individual memory channel speeds will go down significantly.
You probably won't have run into this, certainly not on a D30, but a lot of people get worried that the memory channel speed can drop to a measly 800mhz once you're fully populated. They can feel a bit cheated. But the data striping and excessive number of memory channels opened up per processor more than makes up for it in sheer bus width. And... if you know that's where you're going when you start the build - you can save a LOT of money on the cheaper memory.
I found that making the early decision to go wide, as opposed to fast and narrow, can have a significant impact on cost when building for performance.
But yes, it sounds like your system is probably just a little RAM-bound. And unfortunately, thats one of the few problems with the alternative of spinning up endless commercial instances, they do tend to be light on RAM - and if you're needing 24/7 instead of a few hours each evening then the price starts making home metal look very attractive. So, I totally get why you said "It depends" ... from the sounds of it you do seem to have one of those unusual use cases.
I won't pry, but it sounds like you're doing some interesting things over there : )
Anyway, always nice to meet a fellow lunatic XD
It's amazing !! Congratulations, your lab is awesome.
Excellent video, and thank you for listing all of your gear on your techthoughts.info site. I recently bought a Dell R810, and I was looking for a rack to put it in. I'm not an IT guy, so I really didn't know where to look. And the prices for racks that I did find were way too high. The StarTech looks perfect for the job. Thanks!
I'm a Controls Engineer, so my needs are mostly limited to setting up a few VMs (which is what led me here), so I can run some of our woefully outdated software (I still have to use DOS and ANSI.SYS upon occasion).
Great video. Glad I stumbled across this channel.
The Dell PowerEdge C6100 is also a good cheap server option, for as low as 200£ you can get a 4 node model each with 2 xeon quad cores and 8 GB of ram, if you fully spec it out it really could be a beast
A great video. It covered a lot of ground, including stuff I didn't think I'd have to ask. Nicely done, thank you sir!!
I greatly prefer VMware over Hyper-V, but that's just me. I absolutely agree that pfSense is amazing!
Great video!! Thanks for all the detailed info..very do-able.
Nice Vid, Jake. Love the setup.
Excellent discussion.
love your watch ..great video
Home lab!? This is a full state of art server !!!!
That looks amazing... ill build a server but now i have an athlon 64x2 server with 3gb ram
I have a bunch of those lying around, im thinking about clustering them. Any thoughts?
@@knarfweasel probably not worth it
@@noname-qq7pe as in, it will be a complete hunk of junk? Or just outclassed by modern hardware?
@@knarfweasel Complete hunk of junk. Borderline useless. Mail server, ftp maybe. I wouldn't do anything important with them. Transcoding anything modern would be a disaster. Probably not even good from a "leave this running all the time so I don't have to run servers on my main PC and save power" standpoint. Just useless.
this is a brilliant video sir - thanks a million
Nice video mate!
damn.. this sh*t is awesome.... not planning to spend that much money as you did, but very helpful insights about storage and networking.. great video!
Another fantastic server option is the HP ProLiant series. I got a LFF DL360e G8 off eBay with dual Xeon E5-2440 CPUs and 64GB RAM for 439 bucks SHIPPED!! You can find SCREAMIN deals on Newegg and eBay when it comes to servers. I'm going to upgrade the CPUs as these are somewhat feeble, but it's running unRAID just fine and, for the money? Sheeeeeit...can't beat it!!
R7 10
Ahh I remember the days before I was married, and had kids. This video reminds me how much I need to keep the work stuff at work. Great video though.
Maugh0372 I'm married with a few kids, they play with the lab too. you should try to leave work at work but don't leave your passion for technology or curiosity to tinker around there. Engaging your home lab even for non work related things can still lead to good career outcomes.
Nice Lab
However, a bit old-school to me. I do the very same (use my machine as a virtualization lab). But instead of running a bunch of machines, I use on fat machine and nested virtualization.
Currently, it's a z840 with 2 20core E5-2698 V4 haswells and 256gig of memory. The CPUs are actually QS models (E5-2673) but are function-complete and the same model/stepping as the production ones. REAL E5-2698's are prohibitively expensive. But with some clever shopping on Ebay&friends, you can assemble such a box for roughly the price of your rack setup.
I use Fedora as OS with kvm as L0 hypervisor. The Haswells have all the new nifty features you want, like APIC-V, VMCS shadowing and posted interrupts (if you pass HW to your vm's, L1 hypevisors). Consider these features your baseline for nested virt, thats why any system older that haswell will not excel at nested virt.
On top of the normal Fedora desktop OS, I run full OpenShift container cloud infrastructures, as well as an OpenStack setup, all with Xen or KVM Nova nodes as L1 hypervisors. They even run their own guests.
Networking-wise, I normally use tagged VLANs in bridges, for simple setup, but eventually poke around with openvswitch, if special network setups are required. If have loosely tested ESXI as L1 hypervisor and it seems to work fine, as I am running a cluster of netapp-simulators (for training) ontop of them. I did not test HyperV.
That setup gives a lot of benefits. First of all, you essentially run a single machine. That consumes considerably less power, is started up and shut down faster ( no need to have it running 24/7). In addition to the box, I run a dedicated firewall/router behing my cablemodem (with fixed IPv4), permitting external access via jumphost. That router also provides DNS and DHCP. For any external-exposed services, such as mail or webserver, I use cheap external vservers.
Sure, the setup is a bit extreme and very expensive, considering your paying it all for one machine, but if you are a professional, it should be within your budget. The flexibility is enourmous, as you can literally use 80 assignable threads as cores for VMs. All with a single, large RAM space. And best of all, the z840 is very silent, pefectly suitable for a homeoffice. And even in hot summers, I do not need an air condition. At almost 30 eurocents per kwh here in Germany, the savings in power are enormous.
And the flexibility to experiment with entire infrastructures within just the one machine you use for work, really boosts productivity.
Crazy setup!
I agree this was a great video. I will be diving into your catalog more to hopefully find more of your settings on the software side. I am fortunate enough to have this type of setup at work, separate from my production VMs that I can test and play with. I am looking into a larger scale Hyper-V setup coming from my XenServer setup that I am using in production.
Well spoken tour thanks!
was looking for server videos about virtual machines... this is not what i wanted.. still liked good vid
Great video! Thanks for sharing. Definitely a lot of great information. I myself am in the process of putting together a home lab. I am trying to study for the Microsoft Cert. After watching this I am inspired.
daaaang man... this is easily a couple thousand $$$. It looks pretty damn sweet. Great video by the way
Cool video. Could you make a video to explain how you are using pfSense? I want to learn about firewalls and networking, but I don't want to mess up my existing home network.
Very nice setup. !
Nice Home Lab!!! pretty good video.
Nice setup!! Great video too 👍🏼👍🏼
Great video, great production... subscribed. :-) I personally run 2x R610, 1x R710. and just picked up a C6100 to hopefully replace it all. A couple X5675's should do the trick.
Awesome lab mate..
Wow! What a setup! I'm a bit like you, I like to have my own hardware. But frankly speaking, this level of hardware and this level of investment is no longer necessary since you can hookup to cloud service providers and pay only what you use. You can have a mixed network with some severs of yours being local and some being in the cloud or you can go 100% in the cloud. It's your choice. I have 8 servers that I built on the cheap, usually purchased from video game geeks upgrading to latest and greatest. But for serious deployment, I use cloud service providers, which come to much cheaper on the long run.
wow that was fantastic, great job!!!