What is a HomeLab and How Do I Get Started?

What is a Home Lab and how do you get started? It's easy. You can get started today in a few different ways. You can virtualize your entire home lab or build it on an old PC, a Raspberry Pi, or even some enterprise servers. The choice is really up to you. You'll need to first establish some goals for your homelab to determine capacity for your workloads. After that, the rest is up to you. You can take it as far as you want to go, and remember each home lab is almost as unique as the individual who builds it!

Please share this with anyone who asks what a Home Lab is.

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Find Home Lab Servers on eBay!

⚙ All Gear Recommendations ⚙

00:00 - What is a Home Lab?
01:00 - What are your goals for a Home Lab?
01:30 - Free Home Lab - Virtualization
02:20 - Free Home Lab - "Old" Computer
03:36 - Upgrade Your Current PC
04:22 - Raspberry Pi
05:20 - Dedicated Server
06:32 - Enterprise Gear
07:56 - What is my Home Lab?
08:15 - Why I love HomeLabbing
09:29 - Stream Highlight - What is your channel all about?

"Akita Inu" is from Harris Heller's album Inu.

#Homelab #RaspberryPi #TechnoTim

Thank you for watching!

[TechnoTim]

What servers do you have in your home lab?

[kellanstevens]

I started running a server last year on one of my old laptops and slowly upgraded the ram and then transitioned to a micro pc, and this week I got my first enterprise server, with 64GB of ECC memory, 2x 6 core Xeon CPUs, im sooo excited to be able to run more stuff and at bigger scales. Thanks so much for all your videos, they've helped me so much start my server interest and I've just graduated highschool, I think im going to go into the server industry

[TheThenewdiabolic]

For new people getting into home labs, be aware that enterprise server gear is LOUD. You definitely want a dedicated space for that away from people. The fans are not designed to be quiet.

[rockking]

My first server was given to me by the local school district IT director basically as a graduation gift. I used it for many years during my time at the first university. And they were super amazing and allowed me to put it in the CSCI department server room with public network access. I learned so much from that. Left that university and the server died shortly after the move.

My second server was a retired McDonald’s store POS server. Used it for 3 years.

Finally last year around may or so I built a new custom server based on a 3900X. I still have bigger plans for home lab but right now I’m making do with my current one.

[TechMeOut]

I'm not kidding! As an enthusiast home lab junkie, the way you talk about home labs is genuinely touching!

[johnb]

Your videos are great. I’m an IT major and have been diving into virtualization for the last year. Decided it was time to upgrade my home network. Your videos have given me confidence

[killamixx]

What an awesome community. Everyone here has so much talent…
I barely started my homelab with a dell latitude that I dual boot Ubuntu/ubuntu on (for reliability purposes I have two latest versions) I have so much to learn it’s overwhelming.

[KGZVP]

This is seriously quality content. I haven't seen any of your other videos so I'm not going to comment there, but I expected to find yet another non-technical person either shilling off-the-shelf services or just promoting themselves and was pleasantly surprised to have assumed incorrectly.

Your description of your home lab evolution and your upgrade recommendations was spot on. I now have a great summary video (yours) to send to people who want to get started learning and experimenting.

Keep it up!

[lexshizumdot]

I know this video is 3yrs old but it's still relevant, and really interesting. Thanks for those really helpful explanations

[ckirkyg]

This video just like all content you share on YouTube has great value. You can rest assure if Tim has a new video it will be worth watching! Keep up the good work

[andrewbennett]

I used to be a musician and had a home recording studio, and it's funny how similar the process of building that up is to building up a home lab. I switched to software engineering about three years ago and have slowly gotten into self hosting and home labs, and I love this video! I'm definitely excited to keep upgrading, thanks for the inspiration, even if I am late to the party!

[andrewapperley]

I'm working on building out a home lab. The main requirement my wife gave me was "don't let it be too loud". Well that rules out old enterprise equipment even though its better value than what I went with.

Im reusing an old NZXT Phantom case, power supply, and SSD (for a cache). Pair that with a Chinese x99 board, Xeon E5-2678 (12c/12t), and 32GB of DDR3 ECC ram. For storage I already have 2x 4TB Iron Wolf drives and I bought a 3rd.
This will be taking over the job that my 2011 Mac Mini + 2 bay synology NAS have been doing for the past few years.

[robertamerson]

Thank you for the vids. Besides being informative and great ideas. What I love most is how SIMPLE it was to digest the information. This is sometimes the most important part for novice learns like my self. Keep up the good work!!

[davidterceiro]

I just saw this video and I can't stop watching the rest of your channel really awesome content dude keep it up, you got a new sub!

[Kaussaq]

Loved the video! Im using an old Dell power edge that work were going to scrap. Works great for my make shift game servers!

[jason-budney]

Nice video Tim! I caught your live stream yesterday, was the one with the dead mobo. After watching more of your videos yesterday I am seriously considering a complete overhaul of my setup to get the most of what I have. :)

E-waste centers/stores are another great place to check for used gear at any level.

[NicoVeenkamp]

Due to your channel and some others, I've started a HomeLab based on two older System76 laptops and a Lenovo ThinkCentre minicomputer. At the moment I've installed the Lenovo with ProxMox and am learning about VM's and Docker and the differences and requirements. Also how to handle networking and storage with these machines. In my network is also a Synology NAS and a USB attached External harddisk. Experimenting with building up Truenas in a VM and accessing the various kinds of storage. Loads of fun.

Later on I want to try my hand in clustering the Lenovo with both of the System76 laptops and see how that works.

[bxsteez]

It's actually this channel that made me look at my previous setup and get more out of it. I use to have a media server that had dual xeon processors and 64gb of ecc ram and a rtx2060 super and two sa120s just for media. It all ran on windows and I always felt like that much power for media was such a waste. I found this channel and made the leap to virtualization and proxmox and it has changed EVERYTHING! Now I just have a weaker laptop and I remote into a windows VM or a Kubuntu VM. And with Guacamole and Ngnix I can do it anywhere

[TheDemiRoboto]

Serious question. How much is your power bill?

[Pravardhanreddy]

I started home labbing on an rpi4. Absolutely love ur channel