Homelab

Most of my computer projects includes, or revolves around, my homelab — a 29U, 600x600 mm, rack in my home office.

Found 43 posts tagged with Homelab. Follow along? #Homelab on Mastodon.

Table of contents

Location

My homelab rack is located in the basement, in the corner of my home office — right next to the water heater 😎

Top to bottom

Front

Lambda, Hypervisor (Proxmox VE)
- HP Pro SFF 400 G9
Delta, Hypervisor (Proxmox VE)
- Lenovo Thinkstation E32
Kappa, Hypervisor (Proxmox VE)
- HP EliteDesk 800 G2 SFF
Beta, Hypervisor (Proxmox VE)
- HP Z440 Workstation
Alpha, Backup server (PBS)
- White box
Zeta, File server (Proxmox VE)
- White box
BlueWalker PowerWalker VI 1500 RT HID Power distribution

Rear

MikroTik CRS317-1G-16S+ Network
MikroTik CRS328-24P-4S+ Network
MikroTik CRS310-8G+2S+ Network
Eaton HotSwap MBP Power distribution

Non-racked

APC Rack-Mount PDU Power distribution
Anker PowerPort 6 USB, 60W Power distribution
MikroTik CRS305-1G-4S+ Network
Philips Hue bridge IoT
RIPE Atlas probe Monitoring probe
Schroff Socket strip Power distribution
TP-Link SFP media converter Network

Backup

Every night I backup up all virtual machines and containers, using Proxmox Backup Server, to my dedicated backup server Alpha.

Once a week all VMs and containers are backed up with vzdump¹, and placed on an NFS share on the backup server. And then included in the off-site backup. I’ve done it this way to avoid having to upload all the chunks that Proxmox Backup Server creates (it’s a lot).

For off-site document backup I use Duplicacy, it encrypts, deduplicated, and uploads to Backblaze B2.

I’m currently looking into uploading backups to a friends house instead of B2, but it’s a work in progress.

Power

I used to have an ATS, Automatic Transfer Switch, which allowed the homelab rack to be connected to two power circuits. If one were to drop out, the ATS would swtich to the other.

That device has been removed from the rack and sold, it has never really been useful in the seven years I’ve had it. And I wanted to use that 1U for something else.

The rack is connected to a 15 A circuit — dedicated to the homelab rack and heat-pump. The supply is protected with a Brennenstuhl Premium-Protect-Line 60 kA surge protector.

Homelab power diagram, created with diagrams.net

Power monitoring in Home Assistant

The homelab rack power is measured by a Shelly Plus Plug S.

My BlueWalker UPS communicates with NUT, Network UPS Tool, read how this works in this post.

Power usage

With the equipment I currently have powered on — the power is about 400-410 W. This includes all PoE devices, like Zigbee coordinator/router, Wi-Fi access points and CCTV cameras.

I try to keep the power draw down, and that means power down servers currently not in use.

Noise

My servers are relatively quiet, I don’t have any small squealing fans or enterprise servers. My 4U Inter-Tech server cases have Noctua fans, and the small form factor machines are already pretty quiet.

The MikroTik switches have 40 mm fans, but they run on low RPM and doesn’t spin up. With one exception; if I put a 10 Gbit/s copper SFP+ module in CRS317-1G-16S+ — the fans start ramping up and it becomes loud. But I don’t use 10 Gbit/s copper, so that isn’t a problem for me.

My desk is facing away from the rack, so I am sitting with my back to the rack — which also reduces the noise.