This TINY Server Can Run An Entire HomeLab (almost)

This tiny little server has so much potential and could be the best beginner homelab server out there, packing in so many great features whilst taking up a tiny footprint. In this review of the iKoolCore R2, I take you through what this little beast can do, and how I configured my "Essentials Only HomeLab Server". Let's find out if it as the capabilities to run your entire smart home and homelab needs, and if there are any downsides.

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[EverythingSmartHome]

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year everyone 🌲☃️🎁

[samo]

For your 6th pillar (NAS), you could use an external 4 bay HDD enclosure (like an ICY BOX IB-3740-C31)
It support 10Gbps USB-C and you get realworld transfer speeds in excess of 800MBps. That's what I use for a very low power NAS/Home server setup

[autohmae]

If you want to be even more efficient with your firewall in this set up: OpenWRT as LXC container uses a LOT less memory.
You could probably put home assistant in a container as well.
You also don't need a VM for Docker, you can do: Docker nested containers in LXC as well.
So all in all, if you wanted, you can do without VMs entirely.

[josecarlosvalero]

Thanks for the content, very informative as always.

I would very much love an in depth video on you firewall setup❤

[Scheeringa]

Gotta love Quicksync transcoding! Awesome little product and Merry Christmas!

[pedrozapl]

I believe that there is nothing more powerful and cheaper (for today) than Lenovo M720q + 2 TB NVMe + 64GB RAM + CPU i7 9700T I have built that for 400$ and it's working on 65W power supply

[MichelKroon]

Thanks for this review! Really usefull. I always love your content and recommend your channel to my colleagues also running HomeAssistant.

[Sorrentino_Gianni]

I’d like to ask for a deepdive onto Jellyfin transcoding config, I’m having some trouble on myinstance with resource consumption with random spikes at 100% load for apparently no reason.

[denverag]

I really cannot wait for plug-n-play over the air TV guide and recording for Jellyfin, i'd drop plex tomorrow just because of how unstable plex has been, on windows, linux, and TrueNAS.

[joes_drone]

I bought the R1 a few months back after seeing your previous video. I'm very impressed with the R1 as it has pfsense running as my firewall, OpenMediaVault connected to an 8TB usb drive as my NAS, Home Assistant is also running with 3 x cameras on frigate and I also have Plex running for my media.
So far it's done me proud, I'm currently pondering whether to pass the GPU to HA to help the IP cameras and even maybe remove my Plex Ubuntu server and run Plex as the HA add-on.. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as I'm not sure if that's a good idea or not .
I also run my pfsense using 2 x NICs as vmxnet3 cards but after seeing this video.. I'm wondering if I should pass 2 NICs through to pfsense instead?
Thank you for another great video and here's wishing you and everyone else a very happy Christmas.

[MrWiner]

Loving the videos, small production tip would be to look into adding a hair light to your main "talking head" shot, would give slightly better sepperation between you and your desk. Either way love the video and looks like a great product <3

[kingneutron]

Brother, if this vid was monetized you would absolutely get my $2. Excellent review!

[saninnsalas]

Pretty nice device. Not sure if inside the price range I can afford right now. But I wanted to write mostly because you nextcloud tip is exactly what I needed right now!

[jamegrabham]

Happy Holidays Lewis...Merry Christmas... and thank you for all your videos, it helps me alot...I picked up up 2 Beelink SER5 Mini PC, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H(up to 4.4GHz) 8C/16T, Mini Computer 16GB DDR4 RAM 500GB NVME SSD at the being of this year for $400 Cdn...I use Proxmox on both, with HA vm, and other vm's...This is so much cheaper to run than my old IBM X3500 and Dell T310 server...I still use the Unified firewall and a QNAP NAS...I currently backup my current HA vm to another Proxmox machine, and switching from one HA to another is "seemless", even with MQTT broker add-on...I will look at this machine because of all the different NIC's but...I currently use my managed Unified switch for that...have a Great Holiday...🙃

[ramonvanderwel]

Thank you, this is exactly the setup i wanted to know, and if it would perform!

[TheMongolPrime]

You're great at server related content. Although there are plenty of other content creators out there doing the same thing, I think you could find some great success if you wanted to do more!

[craigblackie]

I currently run home assistant in a docker container, would be good to see a video with the benefits of running in a VM and other install methods.

[MrLumagone]

Any chance you came across a tutorial on how to get the igpu passthrough to a vm to work?

[bryceyorkpm]

Would love to see some kind of "why you might want to build a homelab" type video

[bennylloyd-willner]

Great video, as always, but I'll stick to old laptops for my stuff. I just can't justify the amount of dosh needed for this one. As for the power consumption, I will rely on my solar panels (and future batteries), low cost heating, etc to give me reasonably price efficient power for my older power munching computers.
Merry Christmas t'ya'all