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

Overview

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

GPU/ Management Cluster

Component Description
HP Z840
CPU 2x CPU E5-2673 v3 @ 2.40GHz 30MB Cache, 5.0GTs, 105W
RAM 256GB
NIC 0 Supermicro Intel AOC-STGN-i2S
Storage 0 Intel Optane DC P4800X used for Local NVMe Datastore
Storage 1 Intel 2TB NVMe
GPU0 NVIDIA GeForce GT 730  ( The Z840 would not boot without a graphics card installed)
GPU1 NVIDIA Tesla P4
GPU2 NVIDIA Tesla P4
Boot Volume 16GB USB

This is made up of a single HP Z840 is an amazing workhorse and 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.

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

Compute Cluster

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

Storage

vSAN ESA

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

Hostname Model NVMe Capacity (TB) SSD Capacity (TB) HDD Capacity (TB)
Z840
Z840 2
vSAN ESA 0 7.42
Quanta D51PH-1ULH 0 0 43.5
Synology DS216+ 0 0 2
Total TB (Usable) 7.42 48.7

Network

Physical Network

Model Description
Watchguard M200 Core Firewall
Mikrotik CRS504-4XQ-IN Core Fibre Switch
Mikrotik CSS610-8P-2S+IN POE Switch
Mikrotik CRS305-1G-4S+ Fibre to Ethernet Switch

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