Lab pt2

It’s been a few years since my last post about my little laboratory.

5 years later, after a change of country, several movings, and a job change, the home laboratory went through several iterations until its current format.

Unfortunately, I don’t have pictures of all stages, but there was a Small NAS,

HomeLab

The number of raspberry pi has increased, had 2 Dell enterprise servers, one for storage and another for virtualization,

HomeLab

I’ve gone through several operating systems, including TrueNAS with FreeBSD, ProxMox, Open Media Vault, and Unraid.

And it currently looks like this:

HomeLab

The server:

  • Operating System: TrueNAS Scale
  • Enclosure: Inter-Tech 4F28 Mining Rack 4U 19"
  • PSU: Corsair CV Series CV550 550W 80 PLUS Bronze
  • Motherboard: X470 Gaming Pro Carbon (Yup, gamin!! the motherboard moved from my main machine to server)
  • CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 2700X (Like the motherboard, it moved from my main rig)
  • Memory: Kingston FURY Beast 16GB 3,200MHz DDR4 SDRAM DIMM 288-pin
  • SATA Controller: 1 x Startech 8P6G-PCIE-SATA-CARD
  • Disks: 7x4TB HDD (some WD others Toshiba) + 3x250GB SSD
    • configured in a raidz2 pool, which leaves me with a total of 18.5TB usable space and 2 simultaneous drives fault tolerance.
    • SSD disks are configured in stripe (raid0).

On the shelves:

  • 1 x Synology DS412+, receive daily backups from main server,
    • has 4 Disks (2 x 3TB + 2 x 4TB) configured in an SHR pool (Synology Hybrid RAID) with 9TB usable and 1 disk fault tolerance
  • 4 x Raspberry pi 3 running everything that you can’t turn off when the main server is down, or that for some reason, I can’t run there (more about in another post)
  • 1 x Teldus stick to connect “smart” equipment that works with radiofrequency.
  • 1 x Unifi Switch USW-Flex-Mini where the raspberry pi and teldus stick are connected
  • 1 x Unifi AP Lite Access Point

Rack and accessories:

  • Startech 12U Open Frame
  • 2 x Digitus Rackhylla Shelves 19" 15kg
  • 4 x Digitus 1U Snap-in Panels
  • 2 x Deltaco Panels 19-14 with brushes
  • 1 x Pair of Startech 1U Adjustable Rails
  • 1 x Extension (rPDU) 19" Powersocket 9Xoutlets 2M Black

Why only one server?

As you can tell, I didn’t get here by magic! The laboratory is a learning and day-to-day aid tool, so I try to do as much with as little complexity as possible.

Currently, I spend less time managing hardware and more and more time working with the cloud, designing resilient and high-availability systems, optimizing systems and processes, automating tasks and developing tools to meet specific needs. This being said, if before I wanted to learn more about virtualization and how to automate the installation of operating systems to isntall and run applications. Today those tasks are ofloaded to the cloud, applications run in containers, and everything is automated as much as possible in order to spend less time maintaining and more time learning (or sometimes gaming).

The only critical stuff in the lab is the data stored in the server which is safeguarded by regular backups, both in and off-site. The rest can afford to be down for as long as necessary because all uptime critical applications run in the cloud (mainly GCP).

Plans for the future?

For now I don’t plan big changes, the next investments will undoubtedly go through a UPS and a bigger switch with PoE.

What am I running in the lab?

I’ll make a more elaborate post about it, but for now I’ll leave it here:

HomeLab