The Homelab Show Episode 58: Your Homelab Rack and Server Hardware

[SilnC]

On the subject of power: Here in europe/germany, power has been comparatively expensive in the past, but since the russion invasion, prices have gone up consistently to currently around 0, 40€+ per kw/h. So for my current server build, I chose to go with AMD Ryzen Pro 5650GE instead of Xeon L. Ryzen Pro supports up to 128GB ECC and has lots of compute power with just 35W TDP. Coupled with an ASrock Rack motherboard I also get IPMI. I have yet to find a Xeon with comparable compute power, TDP and price.

[ioulios]

Can you show images or have links of the stuff you are talking about?

[JPEaglesandKatz]

Homelabbing is also a hobby... Experimenting, reinstalling endlessly, trying out different things.. I cannot understand the reason to discourage people so strongly to not try virtualizing everything. If it works, it works... Should you store critical data ONLY on your virtualized truenas? Ofc not. but you would not want to do that on a physical NAS either. You have always should be redundant. Currently it takes me 20 minutes to freshly install a proxmox server including a setup pfsens, truenas instance. Making good backups and actually trying your backup/restore procedure is vital anyways. Ofc you'll hit your head against the wall because you forgot this or that. But yeah.. Cost is a big part of the reason for doing this.. Electricity costs being a major part of it. Of course we can just hand all of our hard earned last money to synology or Netgate... :)

[StacyDubC]

Speaking of switches, what a pain.
Cisco SG3xxx series are my favourites. Maybe a bit more expensive but it’s very logical when you’re setting things up, especially if you need layer 3 routing and VLAN communication rules and DHCP and not using router on a stick. I have 2 SG350 series.
DLINK is a pain. I hate the way they implement VLANS. Such a chore and I always get something wrong then lock myself out requiring a reboot.
Netgear is flakey. If you plan to even switch a port on a windows machine to change to another VLAN u have to refresh the NIC. Other devices have similar problems needing a reboot before it gets an address. Probably an ARP issue who knows. The switch I refer to specifically is G series desktop POE+ smart layer 2. Absolute nightmare for stability. In the wild, I have seen more issues with netgear than any other.
Ubiquiti edge is just confusing.
Unifi simple enough for simple network designs. Easy to get going with only basic knowledge needed.
Aruba is quite nice. Reminds me of a cross between unifi and Cisco. Nice features, easy to use and stable. Above all, super quiet if you want rack mount.
At some point I’ll replace my DLINK for SG series and the netgear for a desktop 10 port Aruba POE.
Art of server, amazing ppl. I bought a flashed IT mode HBA adapter for my dell r720 for truenas. Although virtualised, it’s been fine, fingers crossed. All 16 ports populated with 10k 2.5 inch 900GB SAS with one spare.

[andymok]

QNAP NAS hardware is great, lasts a long time. The OS and apps are buggy and crappy. My TS-873 has been running TrueNAS for several months now. Their boot and shutdown times towards the end were insane. ASUSTOR makes a great NAS, I owned 2 of them and they worked and never gave me any trouble unlike the QNAP. I had fun with the unifi network switches for about 6 months and then had nothing but trouble. After spending 2 months on trying to solve it, pulled it and put back in my Cisco SG200/300 switches and all was great again. No issues with my network Also did not care for the WAPs doing auto-updates when the feature was not on. Two of my friends that also bought the Unifi gear had similar and other issues that I did not have and turfed it as well. We are not some newbies.

[SilnC]

Regarding power supply in a rack chassis: A power supply with SFX-Formfactor should have plenty of space in alle directions to at least not block airflow into the PSU.

[ralph]

I am moving rpi to x86. Why? The price for 12 rpi on my 3d printed 2u rack to 2u Ryzen 5 5600 with 64gb of ecc 6tb of storage. Plus it's been since December 2021 I have not been able to score more rpi. I will repurpose my rpi4 to something else. I use odyssey blue j4125 for my router with untangle. Another unit running j4125 Celeron fanless unit for windows server 2022. Still pretty ok. Use a 19u started rack with wheels great build and sturdy.

[JPEaglesandKatz]

Now if Linode (or other interesting service providers) would actually allow non credit card payments (like paypal)... And yeah.. not everyone overhere has a CC. The free ones cost as much as getting a regular one.. Welcome to 2022 Linode. On the minipc's (kingnovy's toptons etc), 2 1/2 month delivery time unfortunately, well most of them... I think they swim all the way from china.

[christopherjackson]

Just make ur firewall a separate device. Pfsense could run on a peanut. I have mine on Athlon from 2010 with 4 GB of ddr3 and it never uses more than 15 percent of CPU. Typically around 2. It cost me 6 bucks.

My policy has been "don't virtualize the infrastructure that ur virtualization stack runs on top of". Storage and firewall deserve their own hardware. Virtualize everything else.