Homelab – Hardware

My lab is constantly changing. I will try to keep this page up to date with the tech I’m running. My setup is spread across the local stuff running in the garage and “the cloud,” a Mix of AWS and Cloudflare.

Obviously with homelab’s everyone has different requirements and also opinions. My lab has grown organically over the last 10 years some kit has been purchased new. A lot has been bought off eBay or secondhand, and some has been donated. If I were starting from scratch it would look quite different I think. I suspect the replacement cost of what I’m running currently would be in the £15-20k mark

I have several requirements some of them are hard requirements and others I try to meet if possible.

• Must be able to run vSphere (HCL preferred)
• IPMI/Remote management preferred
• Rack Mount Preferred
• Ability to achieve a low power configuration for 24×7 Operations
• Noise isn’t really a factor due to location
• Heat Output isn’t a huge factor
• GPU is nice to have

Physical Hardware

Most of the serious hardware lives in a StarTech 25U Openframe Server Rack contained in a “server room”

Compute

Nutanix NX – 3x NX-1365-G4

3x Nodes in a Supermicro Big-Twin with an identical configuration as below

This is running vSphere 8 with VSAN ESA being used as storage

Component	Description
Model	NXS2U4NL12G400
CPU	2x XEON E5-2640 V3
RAM	255GB
NIC	Intel Ethernet Controller XXV710 for 25GbE SFP28
Boot Disk	64 GB SATADOM
SSD 1	Samsung PM863 960GB
SSD 2	Samsung PM863 960GB
SSD 3	Samsung PM863 960GB

SuperMicro 2027TR with 4x X9DRT-IBQF nodes

Node 1&2

Component	Description
Model	Supermicro X9DRT
CPU	2x Intel Xeon E5-2670
RAM	192GB
NIC 3	Intel Ethernet Controller XXV710 for 25GbE SFP28
NIC 4	Intel Ethernet Controller XXV710 for 25GbE SFP28
Boot Volume	16GB USB

Nodes 1 and 2 are part of a vSphere Cluster running VMware vSphere 8.0.2

Nodes 3 has a Nvidia GPU and is running vSphere 7 for compatibility reasons with the Mellanox Connect X-3

Node 3

Component	Description
Model	Supermicro X9DRT
CPU	2x Intel Xeon E5-2670
RAM	256GB
NIC 0	Mellanox ConnectX-3 40Gb/s
GPU	Nvidia GPU P4
Boot Volume	16GB USB

Node 4 Is out of service

HP Z840

The Z840 is an amazing workhorse and it has been a key part of my lab ( running multiple functions for over 4 years) It currently runs vSphere and I often use it for running Holodeck on top of vSphere.

Component	Description
HP	Z840
CPU	2x CPU E5-2673 v3 @ 2.40GHz 30MB Cache, 5.0GTs, 105W
RAM	256GB
NIC 0	Intel(R) XXV710 for 25GbE SFP28
Storage	Intel Optane DC P4800X used for vSphere Memory Tiering
Storage	Intel Optane DC P4800X used for Local NVMe Datastore
Storage	LSI 9300-16i SAS 12G/s  ( Not currently used)
GPU	NVIDIA GeForce GT 730  ( The Z840 would not boot without a graphics card installed)
Boot Volume	16GB USB

With the Memory Tiering enabled vSphere acts like it has around 1TB of RAM in the box.

Storage

Quanta D51PH-1ULH

Quanta server running TrueNAS scale 43.5 TB usable

Synology DS216+

This is in the house used for “offsite backups” as well as running PHPIpam

Supermicro Node

The Supermicro nodes are of a Hyperconverged setup due to the age of the hardware the storage controllers stopped working with vSphere at the 6.x branch and the Mellanox Nic stopped working with anything past 7.x To make effective use of this hardware I have decided to keep it at vSphere 7 and pass the RAID storage controller directly into a Windows VM to use as a Veeam Repo. With 6x 1TB disks in a RAID6 configuration, this gives me just over 3.6TB of Veeam Repo which is more than enough.

Hostname	Model	NVMe Capacity (TB)	SSD Capacity (TB)	HDD Capacity (TB)
	Quanta D51PH-1ULH	0	0	43.5
	Synology DS216+	0	0	2
	Supermicro Node3	0	0	3.2
Total TB (Usable)			7	48.7

Network

Physical Network

Wireless Network

Ap Model	Description
Ubiquiti Unifi AC-Pro	Access Point Office
Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Pro	Access Point House

WAN

Wan Providers	Description
Zen FTTP (Via CityFibre)	900/900 with a /29 IPV4