My lab is in a constant state of flux. I am going to try and 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 a number of requirements some of them are hard requirements and others I try and 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 a nice to have
Physical Hardware
All hardware lives in a StarTech 25U Openframe Server Rack
Compute
SuperMicro 2027TR with 4x nodes
Node 1&2
| Component | Description |
| Model | Supermicro X9DRT |
| CPU | 2x Intel Xeon E5-2670 |
| RAM | 192GB |
| NIC 0 | Mellanox ConnectX-3 40Gb/s Dedicated vMotion Adaptor (No longer supported with vSphere 8) |
| NIC 1 | Intel I350 Gigabit Network Connection |
| NIC 2 | Intel I350 Gigabit Network Connection |
| 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
Node 3
| Component | Description |
| Model | Supermicro X9DRT |
| CPU | 2x Intel Xeon E5-2670 |
| RAM | 192GB |
| NIC 0 | Mellanox ConnectX-3 40Gb/s |
| NIC 1 | Intel I350 Gigabit Network Connection |
| NIC 2 | Intel I350 Gigabit Network Connection |
| GPU | Nvidia GPU P4 |
| Boot Volume | 16GB USB |
Node 4
| Component | Description |
| Model | Supermicro X9DRT |
| CPU | 2x Intel Xeon E5-2670 |
| RAM | 128GB |
| NIC 0 | Mellanox ConnectX-3 40Gb/s Dedicated vMotion Adaptor (No longer supported with vSphere 8) |
| NIC 1 | Intel I350 Gigabit Network Connection |
| NIC 2 | Intel I350 Gigabit Network Connection |
| Boot Volume | 16GB USB |
Storage
All the critical services have been moved to my HP Z840 running Truenas Scale. The DS216+ is just for backup duties.
| Hostname | Model | SSD Capacity (TB) | HDD Capacity (TB) |
| Synology DS216+ | 0 | 3 | |
| HP Z840 (Truenas Scale) | 5.31+0.8 | 21+1.76 | |
| Total TB | 6.11 | 25.76 |
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 |
| Ubiquiti UniFi 6 Pro | Access Point |
| Wan Providers | Description |
| Zen FTTP (Via CityFibre) | 900/900 with a /29 IPV4 |