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The Lab...

A summary of my journey so far and the kit I'm running.
The Lab...
Photo by Florian Krumm / Unsplash

A home lab is a special thing. It's a demonstration of your passion about technology, it can be a source of pride, accomplishment and of course a fair bit of frustration. They can provide seemingly infinite learning opportunities in todays expansive world of Free and Open Source Software and be used as a means to propel your career opportunities and aspirations to new heights.

My point being, everyone's home lab is unique to themselves, their interests, their circumstances. Some prefer to host on a VPS while others prefer to host their own infrastructure and tinker with hardware. I firmly sit in the later category and this page is to show off share my setup and the rationale behind the choices. By no means is it the biggest, best or most impressive home lab but it's one I chose, built and configured and learned lots of lessons along the way.

Server

Case: Phanteks Ethoo Pro
CPU: AMD EPYC (Rome) 7302p - 16c32t
Motherboard: Gigabyte MZ32-AR0
Memory: 128GB (4x32GB) Samsung Dual-Rank ECC DDR4 2933MHz
PSU: Seasonic Prime PX-750 80+ Platinum
GPU: Nvidia RTX A4000 / Nvidia Quadro P600
HBA: Broadcom 9400-8i Tri-mode HBA
Storage:

  • Boot
    • Samsung 980 500GB M.2
  • Performance
    • 2 x Samsung 980 Pro 1TB via ASUS Hyper-X M.2 PCIe card
    • 2 x Kioxia CD6 2TB U.2
  • Capacity
    • 2 x 6TB IronWolf Pro (RAID-1)
    • 1 x 10TB IronWolf Pro

Like many others, I began my journey with cast-off enterprise hardware, specifically a PowerEdge R430. It proved to be a powerful and reliable machine, more than capable of handling my workloads. However, there were a few drawbacks, including high power consumption (200W at idle), limited expandability, and an annoying whining fan noise that didn't sit well with my Fiancée.

As I fell deeper into the home lab hole, I realized that a custom-built server would be a worthy investment. Over the next few months, I embarked on a journey to acquire various components and meticulously research compatibility, a crucial consideration when dealing with server hardware. A few of the components were second-hand purchases, leading to some unexpected challenges along the way. A few examples include a CPU that was vendor-locked, despite the seller's failure to mention this, receiving a motherboard with bent pins in the socket, and dealing with faulty U.2 cables, among other issues.

The end result of my efforts was a power-efficient, nearly silent workhorse with ample expandability. The spacious Phanteks case allowed for plenty of physical expansion, and the EPYC CPU provided a frankly ridiculous 128 lanes of PCIe Gen 4, offering a wealth of possibilities for the build itself and future upgrades.

Network

  • UniFi Dream Machine SE
  • UniFi USW-24 Switch
  • UniFi U6 lite AP

In terms of the networking, there isn't a lot to say, industry sentiment for UniFi is not the greatest I'm well aware however in my case, I've had very few issues and I appreciate having a single unified interface from which to manage my firewall, switch and AP. Their implementation of some features such as VLANs can be frustrating at times but I would say they're good value "prosumer" products and have served me well in my 1.5 years of home labbing.