How to start your HomeLab journey?

Advance your career as a DevOps Engineer with Simplilearn’s

In this video, I will be discussing how to start your Homelab journey. Starting a Homelab can be overwhelming, especially with all the expensive gear and confusing technologies. That's why I want to share my best-practices and shed light on how to avoid common mistakes when starting your own Homelab journey. #simplilearn #partner

Hardware recommendations:

Software:

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Timestamps:

00:00 Introduction
02:32 What is a HomeLab?
03:45 Best HomeLab hardware!
04:37 Desktop PC hardware
05:22 Minis PCs, Raspberry Pi, ZimaBoard, etc.
06:16 Professional server hardware
08:22 Best HomeLab software!
08:57 Hypervisor operating systems
10:38 Virtual machine operating systems
11:16 App deployment in containers
11:54 Container management tools
12:41 Container orchestration
13:42 Best HomeLab networking!
15:02 Set up a firewall at home
16:11 What switch to buy?

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[MuhammadUsman-xxef]

Sir just because of your content, I have achieved L2 Cloud System Administrator position in Canada's 2nd largest software company ❤

[uez]

Finally, as I have planned to build my first homelab, I've already got 3 mini PCs

[ln.marinr]

I don't work in IT but I just love computers.

That feeling I got when I shared files between my laptops using scp? Dude!

[morsikpl]

I'm just starting my homelab journey... or do I? Funnily enough, I actually had my own home lab when I was 15 or 16 years old (which was actually 16 years ago!). Old Pentium 3 700MHz PC with 256MB RAM. I've had there my own website hosting, 2x OpenArena servers - full ALL THE TIME!!! for some weird reason - becasue it was all running on ADSL internet with 1Mbit/128kbit speeds (yep!).

And now I'm discovering people do that stuff nowadays and even do multiple YouTube channels with all of that! Amazing!

And I always to do something bigger, so... here I am, waiting for 4x Minisofum MS-01 to be shipped and 2G down/600M up internet. We'll see how that goes... :D

And now I'm working as DevOps, previously as Linux SysAdmin since (total 12 years) so I have a lot of knowledge to spare and to share. Planning to do a little overkill and not go with just Proxmox - it's too easy... I wanna do OpenStack since I really liked in in previous company. And yeah, it's totally overkill and totally complicated to manage.

[nathanielmoore]

For starters and even experts in Kubernetes, I highly advise using a manager like Portainer or Rancher. It makes life so much easier to have visual representations and a simple GUI to interact with. I learned command line first and bashed my head on the keyboard for weeks. I still recommend learning it, but I still wish I had known about these tools before my deep dive.

[ExpressITTech]

I started going all enterprise grade then realised the 42u server rack I needed. Just dominated the office I work in. There was also the noise, cooling and power required to drive these. I’ve now started the process of going all desktop of small form factor. I have a 12th gen Nuc running a lot of the heavier elements at present and an AMD variant doing the rest. My final device in the cluster is my Nas which is an old hp desktop. It needs a refresh later this year and will be looking at the new minis forum offerings as well as building my own for some more power hungry scenarios where I may want gpu passthrough. All the advice you give Christian is on point 👍

[hotzemusic]

loved my micro PCs but for a while now, I have been running the main part of my lab on 3 x HP Elite Desk SFF PCs. They draw a little more power but the added PCI slots were worth it, as I wanted to add dual SFP+ and Dual 2.5GbE NICs to them.

Picked them all up on ebay for about 150 each & they all had intel 6C / 12T processors (intel i7-8700). Spent a little bit more to get them all to 64GB of RAM and give them each 2 extra NVME drives to contribute to the storage pool. Now I have more than enough to play around with and learn / do nearly anything I could imagine in the homelab.

I can't recommend enough the Elitedesk w/ the i7-8700. It's the perfect middle ground between micro PCs and a full form-factor server.

[akaScratch]

Thanks for this. I really think this approach will create subscribers. Simple tutorials with all affordable hardware. I'm starting from what feels like zero...less than zero maybe. There aren't many channels in this space that make stupid question/everyone knows that so why make a video topics but I'd probably benefit. The kind of stuff you can't believe someone doesn't know would probably do well. Thanks for the content and great job.

[dertermyd]

I use refurbished Lenovo M720q and HP Deskmini 600 with Proxmox for compute and Unraid for storage and it is amazing, what these little units are able to offer while using just round about 6-10 Watt 😀👍.

[marcwesterink]

As with many things in life, and a HomeLab journey is no exception, just start small and expand over time. I agree it doesn't make much sense to start with a beefy rack mount server for just a few small VMs or containers. I just have a bunch of mini-pc's. Two a re running as a Proxmox cluster with shared storage over SMB (no high I/O or network requirements). A third one as a standalone Proxmox server running my main stuff including my Qdevice for the cluster. And finally a thin client running Home Assistant. The SMB is hosted on a HP ProLiant ML310e gen8v2 running TrueNAS Scale. All on 1 Gbps connections as I have no extreme requirements.

Just for giggles, thin clients may be an awesome choice for just running a few lightweight Docker containers. All these machines are from the used market and there's plenty of supply in such hardware.

You nailed it pretty well in this video...

[Felix-vehs]

15:31 it can even run in active/passive HA mode with the XG Home license :)

[kevinshumaker]

Sitting here looking at my home lab, 2 Ryzen 7 1700/64GB, one with 14TB and 3 NICs, one with 5TB and a single . The first is running Debian 12 & Virtualbox 7, the second is running XCP-NG 8.3, and both are running multiple VMs. I have master images on both to make it easy to spin up anything I need to test, and both have Debian 12 VMs with docker installed. I have too many RPis to count, several Lenovo M73 TFFs for desktops, and a number of laptops, and the only thing I feel I am missing is a switch that supports vlans to isolate functionality, and my previous Cisco died (it was used to begin with)...

[regis]

Amazing vid ! keep up the good work Christian

[captmulch]

To get real world server experience, have a look at buying old HP and Dell servers at auctions - I picked up quite a few for USD$50 - dual Xeons with 64gig RAM. Picked up an old rack for USD$ 70. These are power hungry, so I only run them during the day when my solar is working. For full time services I also run a few Raspberry Pis with SSDs installed. Picked up a rack mount UPS for nothing - all it needed was $50 worth of batteries. 8 port TP-Link switches can be had for $40.

[lzcpg]

Re: Hypervisors vs a Linux distro as the bare metal OS, there are tools out there that make running VMs on top of say Ubuntu much more easily, like LXD, which can spin up both LXC containers and KVM instances.

[lonxx]

I run Proxmox on a HP Proliant Ml30 Gen9 that I get from free, it's powerful enough and the power consumption is quite low. A nice little server 😊

[carlitoang]

Rocky Linux would be a cool playground for starters as well

[danfratamico]

Love the flat Ethernet cables. Looks much cleaner. I wonder why more people do not use it?

[rise-vh]

I am walking this road of homelab for a while, but spending to much time to decide about which machine I should buy.
I know I need to start :)
My goal is to create a homelab to study networking and cybersecurity stuff by running some services and emulate cisco devices(firewall, ise, switches, wlc) in EVE-NG, not only Cisco devices but the main goal is it. It's because I'm starting study for my CCNP.
Really believe I am closer than ever, but still thinking about what's better to buy..
Thinking nowadays about buy a desktop "gamer" 64GB RAM, mother board up to 128GB in case more memory is needed 1TB SSD i5 12th generation, not too cheaper but trying something to start in a good way without put much money right now.
Your video brought hope :)

[Shaqk]

Flat network cables.. my soul cries out in pain :)