Downsizing my Home Lab to a SINGLE PC

this is my home lab and if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me why do you need all this I'd probably have a few nickels but today I'm going to answer that question and say I don't need all of that in fact I'm going to replace all of that with this guy well most everything cool transition did it work so the idea for this video wasn't to build out the most powerful system and say look I replaced my system with a $10,000 PC that's dumb and maybe something I'll eventually do the idea here was to use older but a still capable desktop and upgraded to give it a fighting chance just so happens that I have this PC from my $100 Home Server video and that gave me the perfect starting point the other toppings we have here we'll get to in a bit now before I talk about what I added to this thing let me very briefly go over what's in my home lab I have two whole ass videos going over this but for the most part I have a main epic system running proxmox and virtualizing tress then I have a 3 node ha proxmox cluster that runs kubernetes and Docker a sonology backup system and a UniFi network setup the specs on this $100 Home Server were a four core i56500 8 GB of RAM and dual 3 TB hard drives with a 60 GB SSD for a boot Drive yeah nothing to write home about the first thing I wanted to do was to upgrade the processor to at least give us some hyperthreading I went with an i76700 off eBay for $65 this gives us four cores and eight threads and boost up to 3.6 GHz with a TDP of 65 Watts again nothing to brag to your girlfriend about but certainly better than the 6500 for Ram we upgraded from 8 gbes 264 I already had these laying around but if you were to buy brand new Ram you're looking at roughly $120 for storage I went with two 4 tbte drives again something I had laying around but if you want to go with new you can get two of them for about $160 or if you go refurbished you can get it for about 100 obviously your storage needs will determine how much you spend here but this is my build so yeah at this point we've upgraded our system with $340 worth of Parts which is on top of $100 we are already spent initially but we aren't done yet the board in here has four PCI gen 3 slots three of them are One X slots and one of them is a full 16x slot this is plenty for what we want to do in here and this is where you can get really creative in how you customize something like this to fit your needs and wait what's this this video is sponsored by ugreen and their nexo charging Solutions their nexo line of chargers utilize gallium nitride technology which isn't just for sounding cool it allows them to be smaller lighter and more efficient ugen has just released their nexo Pro Line as well based on the same G Tech but now improved in all aspects with their new GA infinti chip I personally use their 100 W model but it also comes in a 65 wat model if you don't need that much juice or a 160 W model if you're super thirsty with three ports two USBC and a single USB hey it's just enough for me and the C1 Port can even provide 100 W Max charging power I can supply a full 65 watts to my MacBook Pro and the other two ports can do 15 watts for my iPhone and Apple watch or camera or Nintendo switch of course there are no shortage of other charging solutions from ugreen so go ahead and check them out using the links down below so there are two things I knew I needed to add NVM expansion so we could have fast storage for our VMS and run our host on and high-speed networking cuz 1 gbit in 2024 just ain't going to cut it fortunately there are 1X pcie cards that fix both of these for $10 I snagged a pcie card that houses a single nvme drive and then for $45 I got a dual 2.5 GB Nick I threw a 2 TB nvme drive on there which houses my proxmox install as well as all of my VMS a 2 TB mvme Drive will run you about $100 brand new so let's just add that to the tab after this I'm left with another 1X slot and our 16x slot I debated for a while what to do with these and initially ordered a connect X3 to give this thing 40 GB networking instead of 2.5 but I was having trouble with a card and in the end I decided that if we want this thing to do everything why not have a gaming VM we are pretty Limited in terms of What GPU we could have gone since in here we need something that's not only low profile but also single slot since we will be using all four of these slots that basically had us choosing between an Nvidia GT 1030 or an AMD RX 6400 neither of which are really that good the 1030 has 2 GB of vram and was released in 2017 but can be had for only $70 the RX 6400 is much newer as it was released in 2022 has double the vram at 4 GB and is much more powerful but it costs $160 honestly if you're just playing indie games or some esport titles at lower quality then 1030 isn't too bad I eventually went with the RX 6400 and it's really not a great card but more on that later to fill our last 1X slot I knew I needed a multi-port Nick and that is because we're going to virtualize our firewall on here I'm running pfSense as my fire fir wall which will require the VM to have at least two ports for the WAN and the Lan connections I know I already have a dual 2.5 GB card but that's dedicated for our trest VM so we can have fast access to our storage I snagged a dual gbit Nick for $27 you can probably find them cheaper but pfSense doesn't play too well with certain chips but I know that it likes Intel ones so we splurged a little bit and that's it for the hardware if you're a keeping score at home we've put in nearly $700 worth of Hardware into this thing that added up quick now am I going to sit here and say that you need to spend $700 to turn your PC into a competent Home Server absolutely not I don't have a chair I just wanted to see what it would take for me to turn this $100 PC into something I could possibly replace my entire home lab with so let's move on to the software side of things I mentioned that I'd be running proxmox and I wasn't lying and within proxmox the first thing I set up was my true Nas VM because you know what they say a server without a nasos is like a car without a nasos and this is what I'm doing with my main server and it works great and to make sure I'm getting the most out of my drives I'm passing through the entire SATA controller to tress so it has direct communication with my drives and honestly it's just easier from there I created a simple ZFS mirror with my two 4 TB drives and set up some SMB shares I also have that 60 GB SSD in here that I guess I could use as some kind of cache but nah I gave the VM 32 GB of RAM so that's plenty as for the high-speed networking we talked about I have the Dual 2.5 GB Nick pass through as well so this setup can be plugged into any 2.5 GB compatible switch or network and we're good I tested the throughput on our mirrored pool and we were able to saturate the two 2.5 gig connection so maybe I should have used that 40 GB card next up we have our Docker instance I'm just running a plain old Ubuntu Server VM with a simple Docker install and painer on top of that this is no different than any Docker instance I'm running in my entire home lab until someone comes along with a better Docker management UI than portainer that's what I'm going to use from here it's as easy as just copying over my compos template and spinning up all my services I have an R stack for sharing and managing Linux isos an own cash streaming server py hole engine X proxy manager a static site with little link few WordPress sites athelia all kinds of stuff but none of this is really that resource intensive for your CPU and most likely be more bottleneck by the amount of ram you have and how fast your storage is obviously you can run more on here but this is a good litmus test of what you can can expect on Hardware like this moving on to something that requires a bit more horsepower Plex one huge benefit with the 6700 in here is that it has an integrated GPU that we can use for Hardware transcoding while it is a bit dated we still get access to 8bit h265 transcoding so not bad if you don't know what any of that means just know that it's perfectly fine for 99% of content that isn't HDR or 10 bit I spun a my Plex instance a little differently in proxmox you see I could have gone with a VM and passed through the integrated graphics for a Plex to use but I've had some issues with this in the past and decided to go a different route I'm running an lxc container which runs directly on the host kernel and has direct access to the host Hardware including the integrated GPU I did have to add some lines to the lxc config file in proxmox for the container to properly utilize the GPU but after that we were good to go I'm just running an aunu server template with a direct Plex install via the app repository I did also run this lxc as privilege so that I could easily mount my true Nash airs all of my legally obtained movies that I ripped from my DVDs that I kept receipts for are stored on my trass instance and accessed via SMB by Plex when I go to test some playback you can see that when I change the playback to something other than native Plex will start live trans coding and we can see it's being performed by our quicksync enabled integrated GPU this is cool because it saves the CPU from being throttled anytime Plex needs to transcode something this may not be a huge deal if you have like a 96 core processor but we don't and quicks sync Hardware built into this chip is better being utilized than not so neat I was able to have this thing transcoding two streams of 1080p content at the same time without making the CPU poop its pants if you were to try that without the integrated GPU you'd have a bad time now not only are we going to rely on this machine to feed us some delicious sitcoms and movies it's also going to be serving up Game Source that's right we're using this as a game server to host a few private Game servers like Minecraft and CS2 I'll be honest with you guys I'm not much of a gamer anymore but I know a lot of you out there are and want want to host your own game servers the popular way to host a game server these days is to spin up a pterodactyl instance but I find it overly complicated and a pain in the Johnson after browsing around I came across an alternative called amp now it's not free and will require a one-time payment of $10 to get up and going but this was honestly worth it the setup process was so much easier and I was hosting a Minecraft server in like 5 minutes I spun out both the job Ava and Bedrock editions of Minecraft as well as a CS2 server with players in both games everything runs well and while you can tell that something's going on when checking the CPU usage it's not crying out for help now if you're hosting more games with larger player bases while also spinning up 50 Docker containers transferring data and transcoding five simultaneous streams from Plex then yeah I'd get the fire extinguisher ready but at some point you have to temper your expectations a bit when working with older consumer level Hardware but we aren't done yet I said we're using this thing for a firewall I installed pfSense on here in its own VM and passed through our dual 1 gbit Nick setup was pretty easy just select which interface you want to use for when which want to use for Lan and boom you're done the chip in here also has asni support so you get much better performance when using a VPN server or client now I'll be straight with you guys I wouldn't normally do this I'm not a big virtual firewall guy as I like to have a dedicated unit yes I know the pros and cons but ultimately that's just what I like however I know a lot of you like doing this which is why I wanted to show it off and since our firewall is now virtualized within proxmox we kind of have a weird network setup our Wan feeds into the PF sense Port that we assigned as our and and our landport runs to a switch so that we can use it for more than one device from there we can run it to all of our devices like access points servers and well our proxmox server so wait our proxmox host Network relies on a VM running within prox boox host itself yep and I mean it works it just makes me a little uneasy since if there's an issue with proxmox itself the entire network is messed up sure you can restore from a backup on another device and yes even dedicated firewalls die but I don't know I just sleep better at night knowing that my firewall is on its own device in terms of performance it's fine this is plenty enough power for a firewall and unless you're doing heavy inner VLAN Communications you won't even know that you're running on an 8-year-old virtualized Hardware I bought that RX 6400 and passed it through to a Windows VM along with a mouse and keyboard to essentially act as my own little gaming desktop I can understand those of you out there saying Brett I don't need my server to be a gaming system I know that but whose build is this oh yeah it's mine so performance on here for gaming is okay the 6700 gives us enough juice for 1080p gaming and the RX 6400 is modern enough to keep up at 108p even on AAA titles sure you'll have to turn the graphics settings down on some games but it should be able to handle pretty much anything you throw at it the big drawback of this card though is that it has no Hardware en coding built in this means that for streaming and transcoding it's worthless you may not care if you're not a streamer but another thing that is affected by this is cloud gaming if you wanted to set up this VM as a cloud gaming server where you could just remote in with parac to play all your games not happening however with all of that said as a Standalone gaming PC it's pretty solid I did mention that in my home lab I have a kubernetes cluster running on a three node proxmox cluster and while it's not physically possible to run an ha proxmox system on a single machine it is possible to set up a kubernetes cluster just to play with I just spun up three auntu server VMS installed k3s on each of them as a server and a client and just like that I had a three node cluster to test with obviously L you shouldn't do this in a production environment that requires High availability but this is plenty enough to test with another thing that goes on the physically impossible list is a backup I mean you could run a second trass instance on here with a separate set of drives and backup to that but if it's on the same exact host I wouldn't really consider that even to be a backup so overall were we able to run everything in my home lab now like I mentioned some things I'm running are impossible to do on a single system do I still think this is a capable device um duh I pretty much ran a lot of the services most people use along with a gaming VM and a virtualized firewall with no issues also this thing only pulls down like 55 Watts which isn't bad for older Hardware with a bunch of fixings that doesn't mean I'm recommending you go out and spend like $800 and build this exact same system odds are that that $800 could be better spent on Hardware that is better suited for your exact needs but you got to admit this was pretty cool if you think so then go ahead and drop a like if you like content like this then go ahead and subscribe let me know down in the comments what you would have done with the $100 server or how I could have better used the $700 as an upgrade I want to give a huge shout out to my YouTube members and my patreons you guys are my low profile single slot GPU but like you guys actually have hardware and coding so you're kind of useful you guys are great and if you're still watching you're like a 7 out of 10 thank you so much and I'll see you in the next [Music] one

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 158,749

Keywords:

Id: Ug9ljA-M1c0

Length: 17min 56sec (1076 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 19 2024