Home Lab Tour 2022 - EPYC, Proxmox, TrueNAS, Unifi, AND MORE

about a year ago I did a video on what's running in my home lab and to my surprise it's one of my most viewed videos on my entire Channel and this is surprising because at the time all I was really running was a single server and a netgate SG 1100 with PF sense so yeah not super impressive but you guys seem to like it so I figured it's been a year why not do an update video so that's what we're doing and honestly a lot has changed like a lot so this is what's running in my home lab 2022 Edition let's take a look yeah uh we're not in Kansas anymore this is uh quite the upgrade as you can see welcome to my new home lab as you can probably tell yes it is in my garage and I do have a dedicated video on that it is linked up here and that'll be a common theme I'll probably be going through a lot of stuff that I already have videos on so if I do have a video on it I will uh try to link a card up here or in down in the description below or both so also if I cover something that you'd like to see a video on let me know down in the comments because there's gonna be a lot of stuff here I can't go into a lot of detail on everything or else the video would be like three hours long so let's go ahead and start with uh what you're looking at this is a 42 you rack from Nave point it is open air that is perfectly fine I'm not really worried about locking panels or anything kind of the only one in here unless my cat decides to uh try to hack me but yeah this thing was I think three four hundred dollars very heavy made of steel very strong to probably do a pull-up on it there's probably yeah this is probably a bad idea but yeah we have 42 you worth of space in here which is plenty enough as you can see by the b-roll I'm probably running now we do have a lot of space left for activities so future videos uh if some company wants to send me a storeinator or something just let you know uh I got space yeah super happy with it it is sitting in my garage and I do live in Texas so you're probably thinking holy crap it probably gets really hot in there yes but we added an air conditioned unit dedicated 9000 BTU Mini Split unit from senville I think it was like 800 off Amazon pretty easy to install definitely needed if you're putting it somewhere like your garage well worth the investment and to make sure that all of my Hardware is getting enough Cooling uh we installed some curtains look at that kid what's the password yeah I was either do these curtains or build out an entire wall which do I look like a handyman Carpenter I don't don't actually answer that I I know my strengths and weaknesses so we want the curtain pretty heavy duty holds the cool air in zero complaints let's jump into the actual fun stuff and the hardware that I'm running yeah a lot I'm a dirty liar I'm looking at my notes here and uh we're just going to talk about networking first then the uh then the hardware well I guess this is technically Hardware still so at the heart of my system I do have a t fiber I get a gig up gig down yeah I know it's not super fast five gig Mega holy speed but man going from my old house with cable to full fat gigabit fiber ah but the brains of my system are going to be handled by this guy this is a netgate SG 4100 and uh yeah like I said before if you saw the previous video I was running an SG 1100 which is basically the cheapest netgate solution you can get and going to gigabit I needed something a little bit more powerful so we went with the SG 4100 I do think uh net gate hardware is a bit more expensive than similarly spect third-party Solutions but but I am a stickler about networking gear I like dedicated hardware for my networking gear and uh figured just go straight through netgate to get it so yeah but I really like PF sense as my main router slash firewall operating system I do have multiple vlans set up in there I do have a dedicated VPN so that I can VPN back into my home network from essentially anywhere in the world and I do have it set up to access my Pia VPN account so that I can um make sure certain machines and services within my home network are going through a VPN to access the internet for 100 percent legal purposes 100 legal 100 legal I'm also running h a proxy within PF sense to act as a reverse proxy so that I can self-host services and websites and whatnot uh just makes it easy to funnel all the traffic in through cloudflare and then send it to its appropriate endpoint using ha proxy highly recommended fairly certain I have a video on that but then you probably noticed uh this guy right here with the pretty little uh LCD screen that is the beginning of my entire UniFi setup the rest of my network is pretty much composed of unify equipment so let's start at uh why not start here this is the 24 ports unify Enterprise Poe and I really really like this switch it has 24 Poe ports 12 of them are one gig and 12 of them are 2.5 so I do get that nice mixture of having standard one gig Poe and 2.5 for you know future proofing devices I'm busting out the phone for some of this because I have it all written down I can't memorize it I'm old then right above it up here we have a unify Flex XG which is a four port 10 gig switch I don't really utilize it that much I only really had two 10 gig devices and in a previous video I upgraded my main connection to 40 gig so we're not really using that too much but all right I have it now the other half of my switches in unified gear is actually in another room in the house and you're probably wondering why the hell would you do that you have this giant 42-year rack why don't you have everything in there well when we moved in the house was already wired with Cat5e and all of it was terminated into an existing bedroom and I didn't feel like re-terminating everything into the garage so what I did was I left all of that terminated there and what we're actually doing is running a fiber connection from the 24 Port Enterprise switch to that bedroom which is connected to a eight Port hold on an Enterprise eight Poe which is a switch with eight RJ45 ports at 2.5 gig but it also has two SFP plus ports meaning that we can get a full fat 10 gig fiber connect action from our main switch to the switch in the other bedroom and then from there I'm essentially running that along with another smaller one gig switch to the rest of the terminations in the house so it's kind of a Jank way of doing it but it really works for me considering most of the heavy lifting goes directly to my office with a direct 40 gig connection so yeah it's weird I know now the controller we're using is actually the cloud key version 2 and it's worked great for me I didn't need anything too crazy because I'm running PF sense as my main firewall but I actually have a USG Pro that I need to unbox that's been sitting in my room for like a month I need to put it in here so that I can start messing around with a secondary unified Network to test out some of the unify firewall features because I'd like to do some more compare person's direct comparisons between PF sense UniFi and omada which you will see in a minute in terms of Wi-Fi I'm not running anything too fancy I have two in-wall Wi-Fi AC units and one Wi-Fi six Pro unit upstairs so nothing too crazy I will probably add some more access points in the future but for right now it works for me perfectly fine now I did mention omada as well I do run a secondary Network essentially its own VLAN with omada you can see up here I have the ER 605 firewall and that runs directly to my office which has the OC 200 controller with a jet stream Poe switch and a Wi-Fi 6 access point and I use that to test out omada features and do some comparisons between that and PF sense and UniFi and all that good stuff all right now let's talk about the hardware first and foremost my main server it's right here we'll do some b-roll actually so here it is uh my main server this is what I had last year in the home lab tour everything was essentially running off of this now it was in a desktop system I did move it to a4u um rack mounted system that I really like with some easy swap hard drive Bays uh is that Rose will there's like 200 something bucks well worth it but yeah in here we have an epic 7302 which is a 16 core 32 thread AMD CPU we do have 128 gigs of ECC ddr4 memory turning on an ASRock Rack Room 8 2T motherboard which I really like I think it was a little pricey but most server grade motherboards are I'm just going to hold the phone not I'm sorry we are running an HBA card in LSI 9201 it's a 16 I card so we have compatibility for 16 direct drive connections and I think if you use like some breakout cards you can get up to something ridiculous like 128 drives or something but this only holds 12 I believe so we're good uh with a single card and for storage we have 64 terabytes of raw storage in here uh that's enough for now in the future I will probably have to upgrade but luckily we have space So This Server is running proxmox and that is my main go-to hypervisor of choice I do have true Nas core virtualizing here which runs as my main Nas I really really like truenas but in here we're also running a dedicated Plex virtual machine I have run some gaming virtual machines in here as well and I am running poor tainer which is my main Docker instance which houses a whole bunch of different Services ranging from sync thing to multiple Minecraft servers to my R stack which is really cool maybe a video on that my little link website shout out to techno Tim uptime Kuma and a whole bunch of other random services so while it sounds like I might have a lot running on here it's really not I am not pushing this system anywhere near its limits this thing is so future proof that version 50 of this video I'll still probably be using this system okay moving on to my backup system and of course it's up there I'm not moving this camera again and this is my backup system sitting in a 2u case previously was a tower just like my main system but obviously if you're getting a 42 you freaking rack uh you're probably going to rack mount most of your stuff now again we are running proxmox and Hardware wise we are running a Xeon 1240 lv3 which is a four core eight thread CPU we have 16 gigs of DDR3 ECC Ram it's running on a genu x99 motherboard it has 48 terabytes of raw storage and I am running a single lxc container on here to house my Docker slash portaner instance so that I can run sync thing to make sure that everything on my main server is synced directly to my backup server and I also use that container to test out some other services moving on luckily we don't have to go too far we're going right above it a nice little Slim Boy 1u server this is actually a Dell power Edge r210 version 2 and I think I got it for a pretty decent deal on eBay I was nervous about it being 1u and it being super loud but I am running a script that interfaces with the BIOS to make sure that the fans don't go all ape so as you can tell it's really not that loud at all but in here we are running another Xeon this is the Xeon E3 1275 V2 four cores eight threads uh 16 gigs of DDR3 and honestly not too much storage I don't do much storage testing stuff on here I do like service testing and whatnots right now I think it has proxmox installed on it but I've cleaned and wiped this thing and installed so many different operating systems on it that uh yeah I can hardly remember what it currently has all right and just below it you're probably wondering what this is you probably know what this is if you've watched videos on my channel uh this is my kubernetes cluster and it is actually three different Intel Nooks physically they're different but the specs are exactly the same I got them for like 50 bucks each off eBay did a little upgrading on them so each of them is running an I3 4010u it's a laptop rated process processor so they're very low power 16 gigs of DDR3 RAM a 60 gigabyte SSD and each of them has a four terabyte external hard disk drive connected to it through USB so yeah a pretty decent little setup I have a dedicated video on that and if you want to see me pull all my hair out I used to have a full head of hair before I tried to learn kubernetes so if you want to see how that went my week of learning kubernetes uh check it out I'm really happy with this I like having a dedicated hardware kubernetes setup sure I could have just virtualized everything but I don't know I kind of like the little physical nature of it but within that system we are running k3s along with renature for storage we are running Longhorn which I think is really cool I've had a great time a great experience once we're here and Longhorn have gotten set up they've been pretty Rock Solid so far which honestly has been a surprise to me but but within here we are running next cloud my doc site and pie hole and the cool thing about kubernetes is that it is highly available so if any of these physical systems goes down my next Cloud will still be accessible outside of you know my network my docs website will still be accessible and I will still have DNS through pie hole so yeah neat and you probably saw it down here uh sitting on my main server that is my remote server and you're probably thinking why is your remote server not remote well I was running at my buddy's house and I took it back to do some more testing and tweak a few things so uh yeah that is currently being messed with so that I can go redeploy it but yeah it's kind of sitting there taking up space for now and it's not too impressive it has an i5 4590t 4 core 430 gigabytes of RAM and a total of 18 terabytes of storage so no slouch but nothing to write home about and currently it is running true Mass scale and using that two host tail scale which allows me to make a direct tunnel connection to make sure that everything theoretically will be backed up to a remote location so that in the event that something happens to my entire server rack all of my important anime is safe and sound somewhere else that's a lot of stuff okay moving on to like the miscellaneous stuff so you probably were wondering what the hell is this you probably weren't wondering what the hell is this because I can't tell I'm pointing and you guys can't even see it so so right here is honestly one of my favorite things in the rack this is a trip light eight quart KVM it's got a 15 inch screen and uh yeah check it out 1u slides right in comes out open it up and I have full access to almost every single server in this rack I can just spin it up select which one I want to play with and as you can see you're probably not because this is far away but we are connected directly to my main epic based system and we can go in do whatever we want make some configuration changes in the event that you know it's not accessible through the web GUI we can come in here pull this out and you know as if we're sitting right in front of it with the keyboard mouse and Screen I don't know why I said it like that this is literally a keyboard mouse and screen so yeah really cool it was honestly pretty cheap uh on eBay it came a little dinged up but I don't really care gives it character you know nobody's perfect and then down here I'm not moving the cam I'm just not I'm not moving the camera again but down here we have another trip light piece of Hardware but this is my main UPS editing 900 watt system uh it runs everything right now I do want to get a secondary UPS uh because right now in a full power failure I get about nine minutes and depending on what I'm running or what's running uh worst case nine minutes best case like 15 minutes it's really good at protecting against like power surges and blips but I'd like to have two separate systems to get a little bit more in the event of a full power loss but yeah other random things I have two surge protectors in here I have a uh I don't know this is called patch panel automate everything all look nice and pretty uh some cable covers and uh so yeah as you can see a lot has changed in the last year uh total all in price on everything including networking problem he's spent around 10 grand so that is a lot of money now I know there's a lot of you out there who have spent much more and a lot of you are thinking dear God I'd never spend 10 grand on some computers I completely understand both ends of the spectrum trust me a lot of you out there do not need this this is not a flex I know this is completely Overkill but this is a hobby of mine so I think that pretty much covers everything I got this little shelf over here can you see that look at that that's about the the the extent of my handyman qualifications that I put in a shelf to store a whole bunch of crap and uh remote for the air condition and a uh a terrible light yeah I think that's everything I wanted to cover uh let's head back upstairs and uh wrap this up all right that is my home lab tour 2022 I'm super happy with it I know it's a lot of money I know it's a lot of Overkill I don't recommend a lot of the stuff I have to 99.99 of the people but again I have a YouTube channel I like learning I like sharing my experience with you guys that's all part of the fun and it's a hobby to me so I just consider it more of a hobby expense my advice to you guys out there that are looking to get into home labbing is to start small and work your way up piece by piece depending on how your needs change so go out there get a Dell Optiplex start with a Raspberry Pi you know take an old desktop and throw Ubuntu server on there throw a proxbox on there throw trueness on there throw one right on there whatever just start somewhere and just do things learn break stuff that's how it goes every YouTuber you see every expert you see he started somewhere they've made millions of mistakes they've broken things they've hosed entire systems trust me don't be afraid to just get started but that is it I hope you liked it I hope you found it somewhat entertaining if you did please drop a like below if you like content like this then please consider subscribing I'd like to give a huge shout out to my patreons and YouTube members you guys are my 42 you rack support system and honestly you've made a lot of this possible I sincerely appreciate it so you guys are awesome but if you're still around watching to the bitter and thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one foreign [Music]

Channel: Raid Owl

Views: 94,846

Keywords: homelab, networking

Id: r-jSSb9ikIw

Length: 22min 29sec (1349 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 17 2022