I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs
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As a result of 2020's dumpster fire of a year, most of my clients ended-up moving to remote, work-from-home operations, many have chosen to move their gear to colo so I've expanded my 1/4 rack to a full rack at a datacenter where I now also host all my "home lab" gear, including Plex server. The lab gear consists of a Dell R720XD-SFF that runs all of my VMs, a Dell R720XD-LFF that hosts a VM file server and a Dell R720XD-LFF as local Veeam backup target. Also have a Dell R420 running Blue Iris for my security cams as home. I only have a Dell R230 running at home for Pi-Hole and NGINX, plus a 2 Synology NAS as a remote backup targets for my colo gear.
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@AdamF said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
Who is doing on premise home labs these days in 2020?
I don't home lab. I lab on Vultr most of the time. Make it, test it, delete it.
I have an old computer at home running KVM with a small NAS VM and my Plex server. That is not a lab IMO.
I have a Server in colo that I can use for a lab, but it is getting so slow (it is a 2012 Dell R510) that I simply use Vultr.
Yup slow
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@NashBrydges said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
As a result of 2020's dumpster fire of a year, most of my clients ended-up moving to remote, work-from-home operations, many have chosen to move their gear to colo so I've expanded my 1/4 rack to a full rack at a datacenter where I now also host all my "home lab" gear, including Plex server. The lab gear consists of a Dell R720XD-SFF that runs all of my VMs, a Dell R720XD-LFF that hosts a VM file server and a Dell R720XD-LFF as local Veeam backup target. Also have a Dell R420 running Blue Iris for my security cams as home. I only have a Dell R230 running at home for Pi-Hole and NGINX, plus a 2 Synology NAS as a remote backup targets for my colo gear.
Nice setup. I am weighing the options of either ditching the server completely and getting something super low power instead. I use my r710 currently for mainly Plex and photo backups.
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@JaredBusch said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
@AdamF said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
Who is doing on premise home labs these days in 2020?
I don't home lab. I lab on Vultr most of the time. Make it, test it, delete it.
I have an old computer at home running KVM with a small NAS VM and my Plex server. That is not a lab IMO.
I have a Server in colo that I can use for a lab, but it is getting so slow (it is a 2012 Dell R510) that I simply use Vultr.
Yup slow
Yea, I really only use the current R710 for photo/PC backups and plex. It sits in a closet, makes no noticeable noise to me (in the basement) and uses an amount of power that I don't even notice.
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This year, plus getting sick, has shown me that my spare time should be spent making music instead of studying IT stuff. I can do that on the clock (assuming I get to go back to work soon). I enjoy technology and IT stuff, but that's my job, not my true passion. So my "home lab" that is being built this year is for listening to, playing, and creating music. Band practice has been the only light in the year of dark. So here is my home lab, not complete, and suffering from a blown amp on the playback system because I can't physically move the dead one to install the replacement.
"DubStation ZED"
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@RojoLoco I believe that I have one of those wood stereo cabinets if that's what I'm seeing. I've been wanting to convert it to a network rack. Is that what I see with a slide out shelf about 8 inches down from the top?
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@scotth said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
@RojoLoco I believe that I have one of those wood stereo cabinets if that's what I'm seeing. I've been wanting to convert it to a network rack. Is that what I see with a slide out shelf about 8 inches down from the top?
That is an old JVC stereo cabinet my gf had. It is able to hold standard 19" rack gear (mine has a bunch of analog effects, preamps, amps, etc). This one is a little wobbly when moved, but being full of stuff helps it. A 1u server chassis might stick out the back a little. And I also have my gear bolted to some rack rails that are not attached to the cabinet, that helps stability as well. The slide out shelf is 3u, the bottom part is about 8u. This one has LP storage at the bottom, probably 6u more potential space.
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@RojoLoco That's the one. My cousin gave it to me about 25 years ago. It has holes inside for metal pins to adjust the shelf(ves) height. Nice.
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I've moved everything to the cloud.
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We maintain a large lab because one of the key factors for a home lab is running it over time and the cloud gets expensive for that. Ephemeral workloads are great for learning engineering tasks but terrible for administration.
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@VoIP_n00b said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
I've moved everything to the cloud.
Same, way cheaper than having something at home, like 1000+ fold cheaper.
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Is it weird that I don't have a home lab for the last few years? I have just been spinning up environments at work to learn things on when needed as the tech is likely work related anyway...
To clarify, the work lab environments are not running on production kit so no risk to them. Its old hardware that is new enough to keep, but old enough to not be prod. So, no risk to prod... why take up room at home...
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So I decided to upgrade. :). Weekend project while I’m sick. Vms created, moving all data now. This is MUCH quieter than the r710.
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@AdamF said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
So I decided to upgrade. :). Weekend project while I’m sick. Vms created, moving all data now. This is MUCH quieter than the r710.
So moving to the cloud or upgrading hardware?
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@AdamF said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
So I decided to upgrade. :). Weekend project while I’m sick. Vms created, moving all data now. This is MUCH quieter than the r710.
I have an R710 and its pretty quiet.
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@Pete-S said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
@AdamF said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
So I decided to upgrade. :). Weekend project while I’m sick. Vms created, moving all data now. This is MUCH quieter than the r710.
So moving to the cloud or upgrading hardware?
Upgrading hardware. I decided that I like having my systems in house, and between my plex server, photo backups, lab VMs, Pi-hole ,etc, it just makes sense for me personally to have it in house.
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@black3dynamite said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
@AdamF said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
So I decided to upgrade. :). Weekend project while I’m sick. Vms created, moving all data now. This is MUCH quieter than the r710.
I have an R710 and its pretty quiet.
That's what I thought too. but the R630 is even quieter! now I just have to upgrade my network switch to a fanless one, and I'll be all set.
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@AdamF said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
@black3dynamite said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
@AdamF said in I'll Show You Mine If You Show Me Yours, Home Labs:
So I decided to upgrade. :). Weekend project while I’m sick. Vms created, moving all data now. This is MUCH quieter than the r710.
I have an R710 and its pretty quiet.
That's what I thought too. but the R630 is even quieter! now I just have to upgrade my network switch to a fanless one, and I'll be all set.
We already have lots of colo servers at work for testing where I can run whatever I want but having some stuff on the home LAN is nice.
So I'm thinking about building something around this supermicro chassis for SOHO use:
It's roughly 10" in all dimensions. It has 4x3.5" hotswap (SAS/SATA) and two internal 2.5". Takes micro-itx sized motherboards of which Supermicro has a couple of serverboards that fits. Can't go crazy because there are thermal restrictions but that wasn't the intention either. More along the lines of a small Xeon CPU and maybe 64GB RAM or so and a couple of drives.
