The Homelab Show: Episode 1 Virtualization Systems

and i think it's live cool all right we're six seconds in i was just staring at it but welcome to the home lab show this is episode one we're gonna start with virtualization i'm tom lawrence and this is jayla croy also known as the linux guy and learn linux tv so um we're pretty easy we're pretty easy to find and we're starting this podcast because we want to get people more and more in virtualization reach back to episode zero which kind of defines what we're doing now me and jay debated a little bit we had chicken and egg debate of do we start with virtualization do we start with networking yes yeah and i think when i thought more about it you know almost everyone has a router and we can't go over every route or model out there but people want to run things on their home lab they don't always want to redesign the entire network already at the beginning so sometimes it's just a matter of using what you have that's a good starting point for that yeah and um we're gonna talk a lot about proxmox and xcpng but don't limit yourself to only those just because those are the popular ones that tom and jay talk about i've actually done a few videos about virtualbox which i actually oddly i use virtualbox a lot because that's how i run windows on my linux machine people always ask well how do you manage when you have to do something in windows because you use linux full time and oh virtualbox i just pop it open open up the windows thing that i need directly on my computer and get it done test something run piece of software for somebody asian we have to connect to clients that windows is required unfortunately that's just life but yeah um yeah yeah there's a lot of solutions out there for sure do you use virtualbox at all day i do um you know it's funny i did a a almost two hour long video on installing arch linux and it would not have been as easy and it wasn't easy but it wasn't wasn't gonna be as easy without virtualbox because i could start the install i could take routine snapshots i could undo a step in the process and redo it infinitely and that allowed me to really make the flow of the arch linux install work in a video because i could literally rehearse every part over and over again encrypted not encrypted installing the one kernel installing a different kernel it was just immensely useful for that yeah it's still really handy occasionally when i was doing some testing with security onion uh it's just convenient they already have a virtual box image i happen to have a really nice ryzen computer here as do you um you know you have something fast and you're like i got lots of memory i got lots of speed let me just test this real quick and it's convenient it's right here i have access to the terminal without any type of you know not that you can't with proxmox or xc png but it's there's a level of convenience i also have it on my laptop so if i you know want to run something locally there and small linux vms uh run pretty good so now one of the important things to start out with with virtualization is why do you do it and the the goal is and virtualization is still one of those magical things to me i mean when yeah i think vmware was probably the first one out there but once you start taking and thinking about the efficiency you add to let's run everything in one machine and virtualize the hardware my mind was blown like this is so this is the future like i was super stoked about it and here we are and then now we can just take running virtual machines and pass them over to other hypervisors other physical computers and without restarting them so definitely great these are features that most of these features um we i think we didn't we do a video for proxmox or maybe i just did one proxmox versus uh xcpng we've been wanting to do that i don't remember that we've done it together i don't know if you've done it yourself but i think we've been wanting to do a video on proxmox versus xcpng and we've been asked to do it by many people and we've been wanting to do it it's just we're always so busy we haven't gotten around to it i think that might be some of the basis for the idea today to go over hypervisors in this first episode yeah and one of the things too is i i know i did at least one video comparing it but that video is now somewhat irrelevant because proxmox has added features that didn't exist when i did that video my understanding is the new version of proxmox has a better backup system in it now too right yes it does it has a special backup service that you can actually install um on a separate machine i think you probably could install it on the same but i don't know why you'd want to do that but but they do offer a separate product that is supposed to tie into it i've been wanting to look into that for a while um i have not so i can't give an opinion about that today but okay on my list of things to check out and i'm happy that they made that available because i think that's um it has a built-in backup system but if you have another appliance or server maybe you might want to make that into a backup server for it and this is one of those things that i thought i really liked about xcpng is it's kind of a complete package so to speak um depending on your perspective xcpng is the hypervisor zen orchestra is the orchestration tool that manages it which some people don't like that they're two separate things but right the zen orchestra has a full suite of backup methods so from disaster recovery planning to incremental snapshots to a lot of automation around how you handle your vms including things like load balancing is all hand is all handled uh within there so yeah and one thing i'll say just to cut as a kind of aside i try to not do versus videos with a winner at the end i don't really believe in that unless something is orders of magnitude better and it just naturally works out that one works out better but i like to point out the pros and the cons even though i use proxmox i'll be more than happy to talk about the things that i don't like about it as well and with xcpng same thing i mean to be fair i could right now do a video xcpng versus proxmox with a really ridiculous thumbnail of me with a stupid pose and i and and you know announce a winner at the end and i could probably get hundreds of thousands of views in the video but i don't want to do that because i feel like there's pros and cons and i want to go to that level and think to that um which which you know i don't want to sell out but i think there are some pros and cons that really do need to be discussed about those solutions and that's kind of what my angle is today is just to talk about the things i like and don't like about both because i am actually testing xcpng right now as we speak so yeah there's occasionally the mentality of um a lot of people they want a clear winner and there's also the concept in tech that comes up quite if it if when there's two competing products and you make a choice of one you didn't make that choice uh arbitrarily also you must hate the other product like there must be some incredibly strong reason you've went with this product and you must therefore hate said product um but yeah there's definitely a bit much of that so where should we start with the hypervisors do we have proxmox or xcpng because you're running through this decision right now well okay so what i think we should do just real quick and not make it a too long of a portion of this but i think we should go back a step because the question is what do you run it on um and real quick you can run it on anything when it comes to a hypervisor i did a video on a you know using laptops as a hypervisor because you have to have something to install it on otherwise yeah use it so the point of the laptop to keep that short is what a lot of people don't realize is you have a built-in ups you have a battery assuming that it works assuming that the battery still has life in it you have a built-in kvm you have a keyboard and a display so in one chassis you have the the kvm the ups and the server all together and sometimes people have laptops lying around because they don't have a lot of resale value maybe you'll get 100 bucks off of it off of ebay why not turn it into a hypervisor and i can't take credit for this idea someone else on a podcast i listened to came up you know mentioned this that laptops are a good fit and that's where i got the idea from i wish i i remembered the individual's name to credit them but then also there's intel nux i've i've heard of people running virtualizers on that um you could buy off lease servers off of ebay um you know there's plenty of those if you have a spare desktop lying around as long as it has virtualization support the only re that's the only requirement and as far as specs there's no hard requirements it's just that the more cpu cores and the more memory you have the more things you can run so the it just presents a ceiling to you you don't have a minimum number of cores if you have one core you know maybe you'll run one or two vms on that um but if you have like you know eight cores even better so i think the first thing i tell everyone about home lab about hypervisors networking use what you have to start out don't just think that this is oh i have to go buy a bunch of stuff no you probably have stuff lying around that you can use you have a router even if it's a d-link router or not there's a there's anything wrong with that um you could probably set up forwarding rules in there there's options you can use to set up your network so use what you have first that's where i would say is the best place to start and then you have to choose what do you want to run on your hardware and now that's where xcpng and proxmox comes into play yeah and i actually i do like the the mental concept because i built a uh cluster called the lackluster dell cluster when i was doing a clustering video and i just took a bunch of um old dell computers i think three or four of them and tied them together to build a cluster with xcpng you don't necessarily need server hardware this stuff is like you said fairly flexible and the laptop idea is actually kind of a cool one you have a handful of laptops stacked up they for a home lab environment and trying to learn that setup is kind of a fun way to build it exactly i mean using what you have and having that mentality just really sets the stage for the rest because just if you do have extra money and you want to buy something yeah if that's what you want to do but you could also save that money and put it in invest it and not buy anything if you have things lying around you don't need state-of-the-art stuff and if you think about it um you're just one person typically or you're one family when you're home labbing so it's not like you have a thousand users so that server that is on ebay for a hundred dollars that is not useful to a big company anymore because it just doesn't fit the bill anymore for you and your family or your local circle it's more than fine and probably more powerful than um you might think it would be yeah the um the amount of deals are on ebay are pretty impressive right now and a lot of it's being driven just with these data centers there's a faster turn the demand that space is very available in the data center and there's more and more churn happening with some relatively fast hardware you can acquire for reasonable prices yep i do want to mention i know we're going to get to the comments later uh that's how we're structuring the show as we start with the topic and then we go into the comments but there was one that kind of just stood out you know uh that hyper that um proxmox and xcp and g are not hypervisors which is true it's zen and avm um but it's kind of one of those things that's really hard to avoid because you kind of lump things in the same category as human nature so we're also human by the way just so you guys know that if you didn't know already but um yeah that is true we kind of use hypervisor at least speaking for myself even sometimes where it doesn't make sense but essentially you're you're building a virtualization server yeah in in i know it's all depends on how you want to break it down i mean if you call it the computer but then you know i i'm not going to get pedantic that's i get it and a lot of people are in tech and i i do believe absolutely an importance of not just generically calling everything a monitor like many end users do everything's just a monitor to some end users no matter what part it is but i i agree there's they're trying to find a balance on there we we do realize the underlying technology is technically the hypervisor and you know zen server is what's in the base of xcpng um and what's the back end for proxmox that would be kvm yeah it's using kvm internally so the built-in virtualization support in the linux kernel so i'll just mention some of my thoughts about both xcpng and proxmox and why i made the decision um i'll try to keep this in a short summary if i can but when i was looking at those to figure out which one i wanted to go with i have to say it was a hard choice it was not like oh this one is so much better than the other um i have had a history with zen server for quite a while so it was probably pushing that ahead for me because i have fond memories of working with it when i did professionally but what i liked about proxmox was two things two benefits which one i only have one benefit now i'll mention why in a minute but at first it was the built-in user interface it wasn't a separate component at the time i didn't like that a lot of people don't like that but what really pushed it over the edge is that i can make a decision because it has built-in container support we're not going to talk about containers today but i like the fact that i can make an intelligent decision about when i want to host an app is it going to be in a virtual machine or a container maybe it's fine in the container and again i don't want to make this a discussion about containerization but i do think it's important to point out that containerize all the things is not a great idea some apps do not work well in containers it's trial and error it's just the way it is some apps were just hard-coded with certain things they just don't run as well but i can make that decision with with proxmox because it's built in and you that doesn't mean you can't run containers on xcpng it just means it's built in with proxmox um and i think that was what really pushed me over the edge going that direction however i will retract feeling like the lack of a ui built in as a detriment because when i just installed xcpng you know last week i really liked the fact that the ui component was separate because i can install zen orchestra which is what that's called on my laptop i don't have to use cpu cycles on my virtualization server for the ui i if i wanted to i could run on a desktop um but i installed it on my laptop and i like that because it's separate and you could argue maybe there's a security benefit there there's not but i like the portability of the user interface now that i look more into it but [Music] one of the things that i would say pros and cons i'll just say one thing i think is a benefit of both i would feel like when it comes to xcpng it's better for mass deployments if you have a company or you are a company and you are you have offices all over the place i feel like xcpng would be better for mass deployments and going you know commercially over the globe so to speak than proxmox would be doesn't mean you can't do it in proxmox but i think that's a major benefit um with that i also like that there seems to be more development around xcpng partially because it's newer they just have more exciting features in my opinion some of the release notes for proxmox can be a little underwhelming in my opinion but proxmox is very very easy to get started i would say a little easier than xcpng and everything is all built into one there's one component so you could argue that that's a benefit um there's pros and cons to both but those are some of my opinions on it um i one of the differences with xcpng and me talking to the team over at oliver lambert and a team vates that actually produces the open source project one of the reasons that they have so many features being added quickly is they have a lot of data centers using it and i don't mean like people in data centers i mean like large scale companies if you look at some of the large companies that partner with them to deploy it they have some people who are using it at scale and it's not like it's a new hypervisor this came from zen server which is a really long time been around for quite a while hypervisor and citrix had built it out and citrix you know being the marketing company that they are in some ways and a big tech company they marketed very well to get a lot of people on it and they kind of didn't innovate anymore the only innovation they had was crank that license fee up higher uh keep removing features and charge more and we're not going to add any value so because there was such a large commercial base already of large-scale users when they flipped over to xcpng and kind of forked back the project away from citrix and started producing you know all the full features it brought all these data center problems um that people were wanting so they already had a backlog of requests that citrix has been kind of going yeah we'll get around to it how about we just charge you more for licensing so now that um now that you have a team really interested in developing the product and has a methodology around it and built they got quite a few people working over their vapes they're not small anymore uh they've they've scaled up quickly in the last couple years and are still hiring more people that innovation now is being driven by all the funding that comes in from them selling support contracts for it so it's not like they don't have a model around it but that's causing this kind of ramp up of popularity and innovation which is really um really cool to see like you said it's not it scales out very big by keeping the components separate but you're right from if you're a new user starting out and you're only going to ever run this on maybe one server you have it it can make a little bit less sense to you to run xc png and maybe proxmox would be a better fit for you and i don't have a problem with proxbox at all right um i've played around with it a little bit i'm not an expert honest way i just defer people to jay's channel for videos and tutorials on it i don't plan on doing any but i um i think it like you said it's a lot easier for the first time users to get started and someone mentioned and it's worth noting uh it uses qmu and kvm underneath and so does uh synology so kind of a little bit on the hardware topic i know at least some of the homeland people do like synology and synology has their own spin they put on the interface they have their own ui for it i actually just did a quick review of it because it it's free for the basic features but as soon as you want any advanced features they have a license fee associated with it but yes synology does have that as well i'll just address that in the comments yep yeah so i i think like you know we could talk all day about pros and cons by i think like that really in my opinion kind of narrows it down i i'm not going to make this in a you know jay's proxmox versus tom's xcpng battle of the best kind of thing which i know a lot of people want but we have to be honest i mean if if there was one that was so much better than the other then there wouldn't be the other because everyone would just use the one that is clearly better and the fact that we have this competition means that there's value and sometimes it even comes down to some i.t administrators just want to run at home but they run at work because they want to just you know use it as one they could get their home lab done but also they're at the same time learning more about the solution that their employer uses and sometimes that's what it comes down to yeah i see a lot of people always mentioning you know hyper v and x and uh esxi and they uh do have like in esxi i know they have like special home edition uh licenses or i'm not exactly sure how that works i know there's been changes to that program but um either way there are there are ways you can get this set up in your home lab now if you're working towards a job to be an administrator that does esxi because that's what you use at work it's a really valid reason not to try either one of these and go with what you're going to be using because one of the purposes of the home lab is one to learn now is your goal to learn a hypervisor well then you might want to learn a hypervisor that is at the end of that job goal that you have so if your job goal is to become a hypervisor administrator at a place that you know employs people who use esxi that's probably the best one to learn on i think it's even more fun if you can learn on all of these because i've tested each one of these and learning the nuances of one or the other it's helped and there's a few people that are going to mention you know things like hyper-v if you're going to use hyper-v and your goal and or the work organization that you have the next level up it's your job is a hyper-v admin because that's what their back end is based on then go with that that's going to be a good choice for you because it's going to give you the learning experience you want to get where you want to be you know where you want to level up to um i'm not trying to level up to a be a hyper-v admin so that's not me we are forced to be a little impartial at the same time given the audience but at the same time let's be honest there's a lot of people out there that are starting home lab only because they want to run plex because that's a very popular entry point and sometimes that leads people in a rabbit hole maybe that's all they ever wanted to do they want to run a plex server they want to watch movies that's it but then when they set up that server like wait a minute this is fun i i just set up a server running linux and it runs plex i've been watching my movies on there and it's great but what else can i do with this server what else can i host and then you go down that rabbit hole sometimes that's how people get led into this i think everyone's reason for starting a home lab is different but i think that's a very popular one to learn um which is how i started um actually that's one of the reasons i started i think i got really annoyed with um some of the providers i was using not being fast enough when i submitted tickets like part of that is my arrogance like fine i'm just going to do it myself like i don't want to wait you know and someone brought up another one that we didn't mention all unraid unraid uh has been popular for a while one of the things and i'm not an unraid user but i've you know watched a few videos on it to get an idea there's actually one particular youtube channel if you look them up it's got a weird name i think it says space invader one if i'm not mistaken he's got a bunch of unraid videos i know they exist i've watched i remember watching a few of them so i was curious uh not curious enough to actually load on raid but one of the things i noticed about them raid is they seem to do a nice job of offering a web ui that lets you um pass through devices this is something that is a popular for home lab less used i mean and with some exception but less used in the business market because the idea is to make a vm completely portable you can put in any machine and the problem with passing through hardware um well it ties that vm to that machine but for home users you're trying to get the best bang for the buck and unraid i believe makes that a little bit easier i think they just have like a check box that says hey take this device and allow it to be used inside this vm like pass it through you can do that both with proxmox and xcpng but i don't know about the proxmox process but i will say the xc png they have a write up in the tutorial how to do it it is a more complex process because it does require command line figuring out the pci device name and uh setting it up yep yep i haven't used that myself the on raid service but um i've heard a lot of good things about it it's helped a lot of people use what they have you know going back to the start and um it enables people to do that rather than having to have very specific hardware they can abstract that a little bit and use whatever they might have in their box of junk parts or whatever but you could stretch that pretty far um i think which i think is a lot of fun too no i've never used it but i've seen it come up a couple times here in the comments is the overt um i'm not something i've used so i can't really speak to it is there is there any good interface on top of overt i don't know that's a good question i i'd have to look at it off-camera yeah it's not one so i so me and jay are not going to be your uh help much of a guide on overt neither one of us has used it and never really dug into the interface on it someone did bring up a good point though now i will mention true nast in two different ways so current truenass and i know someone um is going to be offended because they already said how much they love the way beehive works in truenass i don't share that love with you i have found um true nas and beehive to be more buggy and less stable not to throw shade i'm a huge true nas fan but the truenass system when it came to the hypervisors i really feel like it's just not as well developed with the beehive system that leads us over to truenas scale which is going to have kvm integrated that obviously is a pretty exciting product release that they're working on um i've done some updated videos on that topic but tunas scale when it comes out because it's going to be debian based will i believe have all kvm in there and but all the wonderful goodness that is true nas and zfs and the way it works which is a very well developed product um yeah that's obviously going to be exciting it's still very beta right now so it's not something i'm really going to um it's not something i'm going to be doing anytime soon i'm going to wait till well right now it's in alpha i can't even say beta so trudeau scale is alpha right now so that's why i haven't done any videos on i did a video to talk about its production and where it's at but it's not it's not something i would run things on it's in it's in like hey watch all these bugs and i'll do some bug reporting with this face yup and someone asked what the robot thing is on top of my server rack and that's a mycroft device it's the mycroft mark one and i haven't had time to get back to him yet i at one point had him configured to do all kinds of different things um ended up misconfiguring it and broke it but i plan on getting back into that and setting him up i'm going to set him up to be like i could say hey and then name of assistant which i don't want to say right now because it'll interrupt us and i can say update all my servers and maybe it'll run an ansible script to um you know do do some various things i had it hooked up to my uh jukebox that's running volumio if i'm saying that right and actually did have it set up to where i could tell it the name of a song an artist and would just play it i had like really loud dedicated speakers on that which was a lot of fun i just haven't had time to get him re-enabled yet so maybe in the future i'll do a video on it um right now it's kind of on a soft pause though he looks a little up here though i actually think that'll be a fun that'll be a fun homeland video because that'll be the how to build your home automation thing you can talk to that doesn't belong to one of the big companies yeah i think that's why i got it too because i i i mean the code is exposed i love python and at some point i want to write my own um you know plugins for it which is what i intend on doing and they give you the framework for that too they give you like a skeleton python thing that you can just start with and then you can just you know you know what types of things and interfaces you have to build and then you just build it which is pretty cool that they give that to you and you can actually and i haven't done this but you can actually download the source code to run it on a linux machine you don't actually have to buy the you know the device i wanted to support them though which is why i did it so yeah it's definitely it's definitely pretty cool we'll definitely do a whole uh we'll do an episode just on that talking about all its features now and someone mentioned lacuna coil so so i got someone else loves liquina coil too yay my favorite band anyway um other people are talking here about when we was bringing all the extra virtualization uh one thing that's of note because someone asked about ceph support there's a lot of add-on support that i haven't really dove into and tested but you can head over to the forums this goes for both proxmox and xcpng they both have support for more than just zfs or ext based file systems but one thing that truenas uh i'm sorry xcpng didn't do that proxmox did do was the way snapshots are handled in xcp and g is they are snapshots as part of the setup and rapper as someone would prefer me to call it it's part of their snapshots when you use proxbox if i'm not mistaken jay doesn't it actually natively talk to the zfs file system i haven't done as much testing on that i was using gfs i had some major problems with that in proxmox where i felt like zfs support was not mature enough now that was quite a while ago though so i have no doubt that they fixed it um by now i actually plan on converting it back over to zfs so i can i can submit bug reports if i run into the same problems again but um yeah i'm going to have to say i don't know i i've heard that but that's something i'll need to test off camera yeah now as far as the other your more san oriented distributed large-scale file systems such as gluster uh gluster fs or um ceph those i you know i i think of more homeland people ask about them than would actually use them they're cool um i'm going to be working and this is some future uh hints what's going on in my channel uh 45 drives and me are going to be getting together they actually 45 drives has a lot of good videos explaining large scale file systems and they're going to join me on my channel where we're going to talk about some of the larger scale file systems and it's kind of interesting topic i don't want to get us off topic on there most of the time though as a home lab user you're fine to set this up with you know a raid ext system or a zfs system and that's probably adequate for the majority of home lab users but once you yeah need a super high level storage server where you want to cluster your storage across multiple storage servers then things like your a gluster or ceph start making sense going all right i have these three systems this is actually something that truenas scale is going to be designed to really facilitate as well is you're going to be able to scale out hence the name and then say all right here's my file system living across three servers that's great but a lot of homeland people are going no i want to try to condense everything to one server and uh you'll get there eventually but we don't want to get too far out of scope on this right yeah that's a that's a rabbit hole at that conversation everything's all connected man it's all it's all physically wired to itself so it's it's sometimes that's the hardest part we have is when b and j are putting these topics together going how do we narrow it down yeah and i have a hard time narrowing things and summarizing things already as it is so much people watching my videos probably are well aware of um so looking at the comments um i think we should knock out some questions sure you see why does 45 drives not use epic someone just popped up and i'll actually if you go some of their models are slowly starting to support it i think what people don't realize is the way supply pipelines work when you're trying to build out servers they don't turn on a dime servers have to be turned on and should hopefully within a five to seven year life cycle of a server never fail or get turned off so just because something new and shiny is out there you'll find a slower adoption especially in hardware before you see very high levels of availability to something so i did notice though i believe a couple of their options now when you're pricing out servers on 45 drives we're just doing it the other day for a client um now offer epic so it's it's not like their default option but it is an option on there yep and someone brought up power usage which is the elephant in the room when it comes to home lab at one point i think my rack was using five to six hundred watts all the time and some of the ways that i got around that was i used a raspberry pi with wake on lan and inside the servers i had them automatically shut down at i think midnight because i'm sleeping i don't need the servers to run while i'm sleeping unless it's the day they send off-site backups so i would have the the crown job on the servers to shut them off and then the raspberry pi had a crown job at like 7 30 in the morning and it would trigger wake on land for all the servers so as i'm waking up i'd actually hear the were of the you know dell servers powering up right as i'm waking up and i save some money just by not having the servers on when i'm not awake and no one else in the house is awake so that no one cares at three in the morning that the plex server isn't available so that worked out pretty well for me and then also this is a topic for another day raspberry pies for some use cases are very very good for a lot of things they use a lot less power and then finally the um the rack behind me i did some videos on this each of the two servers between trunas and proxmox are using about 50 watts each so i went from you know everything combined i think it's like 140 150 watts down from 600 and i did that by using more power efficient components so there there are some ways to game that quite a bit if uh if you get into that is it if nothing else if you have a super power hungry server already and you don't want to buy another one you can't buy another one then just have it turn off when you're not using it get a raspberry pi to turn it back on for you um just enable wake on land in the bios install the wake online on land package and then um you could save some money on that alone yeah trying to be efficient is kind of a mix as much as you can find some good deals on enterprise hardware one of the other expenses that data centers have is wattage electricity so they are when they get some of the new ones and you grab some of those old ones you realize oh these were not as efficient that's part of the reason for the life cycle change was to have something that is an even higher efficiency so there is some advantage to buying and building some of your own occasionally you'll find that you might be able to save a few watts on some of the uh home built stuff versus the enterprise stuff i've noticed that um you know it's just the nature of it like the dell r series servers are really popular and each version is a little bit more efficient than the previous one but you know they have a lot of fans they have a lot of wattage that they pull and uh between the noise factor is someone brought up earlier and the wattage yeah they just there there are other more efficient ways to go matter of fact we have a um our oldest and happiest um old truenass is an old i5 like a generic motherboard like with the crappy intel mount and a fan not looking cool everything's been running for six years now continuously it even has a standard uh corsair power supply it's any large you know form factor chassis it's any rack mount chassis um but it works perfectly fine running truenast with a has a sas expander card to handle how many drives it has in it that's it there's nothing special about the board it's a consumer board is plain and it's not even a gaming board it's not anything slightly better and you know i'm glad you brought up the r series servers one of the things that i a couple of things i did and i know this sounds obvious to a lot of you out there but check the bio settings because it could be on i forgot what the setting is called where it's using all the power on the cpus all the time i mean at a business you kind of need that because you want those uh vms to like fire up quickly and you don't really need that at home just turn that down um you don't need to run everything at the maximum but another thing i did i is that i bought a um is that there's well there's l series xeon cpus you could buy an ebay you can replace the cpus in your dell servers with those l series cpus they use orders of magnitude less power and for 11 on ebay i ordered some of those processors they sent me a ziploc bag full of like 10 of them for 11. literally 11 us dollars i i had more of these cpus than i could ever use i only had like four servers and each had two um cpu slots each so um one of them i actually unpopulated one of the cpu slots and lowered the amount of ram and then replaced the one remaining cpu with an l series one and then the hypervisors i put the i put both are filled both sockets in there and um i just switched everything to l series cpus and that saved some power so that 11 will pay for itself probably the same month you buy it if that's something you already have is you know you have your dell server so look at the bios settings and look at the l series xeon cpus a lot of people don't think to consider that yeah and as we talked about the very beginning of the show laptops it it's an easy solution they're generally designed with power efficiency in mind from the time they built the laptop to try and operate on battery they're still you know not going to be the most powerful but for getting started for low noise i mean even when a fan ramps up on a laptop it's usually not killer loud and uh yeah it's another option if you want to start with some low powered options for building your home lab oh yeah but you know you could like you can find some deals on these old laptops shove a little extra memory in there and now you have a nice system to run a bunch of virtual machines on and thanks to jeff for buying my book you know i it's something i keep forgetting to mention the live streams um you know my name he's got a book yeah i got a book ubuntu serverbook.com easy url just go to that and it points you to amazon which i don't know if you're if you're not in the united states that might work against you because it might just bring it to the united states page either way um it's a good starting point if you're curious um yeah um i've heard some good things about the book so apparently i guess i may have possibly done a good job with it so um either way it's a thing that exists if you want a book on something to read so thanks jeff yeah the um the getting rid of heat a few people brought that up there's that's just kind of a pain in the butt uh oh yeah you can put in split systems at some point these computers even my office is actually a six by nine closet and i kind of joke because i i don't really need to heat it much in the winter because i can just render a couple videos and once all them cores get peaked up even my single computer that's in this office which is you know a nice ryzen system it starts really kicking out some heat um there's no easy answer for that one you can look into those split systems if you're not familiar with a split system is they're often something an hvac system that can be added additionally that kind of has a split and if you put this in the closet we do this commercially a lot but they're actually there's consumer ones that are somewhat affordable to do to be able to add to your uh area that you keep all this in basements are kind of a cool way to do this um if you're lucky enough to have a good space that you don't have to worry about moisture or flooding issues and get it in the basement so it's separated craft computing i'll mention him i've done some collab videos and before he's actually done a lot of good videos on servers lately he's been buying some off ebay he also bought i believe one of his videos he talks about a fan shelf and that's um when you have a rack you can put one shelf that's dedicated to fans and it helps circulate air out of the rack so there's other ways to get it away from the rack it still just ends up somewhere else you have to have somewhere else for it to go though someone asked about pdf format for the book if you buy it from the publisher they have it in pdf but but more on topic about heat i'm glad you brought that up because that's a constant problem i don't talk about if it ever looks like i'm sweating in my videos i am um this room if you think about it there's two desktops there's a server rack and to not be undone i have a reptile terrarium that has a box turtle that lives in there that has heat lamps so after about three hours i'm faced with a decision do i open the door and let all you know to basically cool it off that's all i have to do is open the door which means that the kids will run in here um and you know it's fine but it's just one of those things that's always been difficult for me and i won't even notice that i was sweating until i the video's already uploaded i'm like oh how did i not notice that that's embarrassing but um this room generates a lot of heat within two to three hours it's it's like uh it's insufferable in this room so i need to probably work on that at some point i thought about putting in an ac but as soon as i do that i record videos in here so uh you don't want to hear a loud ac in the background and i don't so um it's kind of complicated so yeah yeah that's definitely an issue definitely an issue and i i the reason i brought up moisture is because i'm aware as someone pointed out um that yes craft computing suffered a flood over at his uh uh his place where he lives on that side of the world um it's funny because me and him are personal friends so we've had some you know conversations not that are not on youtube when we're just talking and we were at the time where i lived we talked about flooding issues and he was telling me how he had two sump pumps and a backup and uh it took a calamity of errors because every every backup failed and turned into uh him flooding his studio which turned out to be not the total it was not good but it wasn't as bad as it could have been he got it he got it mitigated so he's got a video on that for those wondering uh about craft computing and jsb just thank you for the uh five pound as it says pounds five pound donation i believe that's pounds i know american dollars but we'll it's fine we'll do the i don't know what to convert to so i'll just say five pounds yeah that works for me yeah for sure see if there's anything else in here that um well as an aside excuse me i had a um a water issue of my own but that was back in like 2012. um it was the weirdest thing you know i had everything elevated so you couldn't really i mean if the basement flooded where my home lab stuff was it wasn't going to um flood my my rack but what i didn't realize is that we i had like an ice shelf building in one of the bedrooms between the the door there's actually a door in the bedroom leading out to the patio there's a screen door and in between a wall of ice developed and then when spring came that wall of ice started to melt and it melted and dripped through the floor and my um thankfully it was only the cable modem that that decided to be where you know all the water drained into the cable modem because it was had a vent on the top so the water came down and cable modem completely destroyed thankfully that's that's all that happened but you don't think about a random ice shelf just building between doors and draining into your basement but you know water and technology doesn't really mix unless it's water cooled but then again as long as there's a rupture that should be fine yeah and something else when you're thinking about you know where to put the servers in placement and i've been dragging my feet because i haven't finished it um i put a rack in at my house in my basement and um i still don't have it's a new house build the sump pumps new but i still am going to put it back up some pump in there that solves one water mitigation problem the second water mitigation problem is and i you know if i could find the video i could i would link to it but i don't know where it is wendell did a really good video wendell from level one text on building out data centers and one of the things you have to think about and or just building out a server closet uh is putting plastic up above if there's the potential for water to come from above where my rack has to be and where it's most practically laid out happens to be under where both showers are right above it so if there's anywhere where there's going to be a leak in my house because of some incident of an overflowing shower or something like that or bathtub that happens to be right above my servers so what i am going to do is show once i get it installed that's why i haven't done the video because it doesn't exist yet but i know i should do it there's very little of my home rack by the way most everything is here at my office but that you should put it's as simple as putting some plastic just to redic redirect water because a lot of the leaks are small but they can cause a little bit of water in the server may as well be a lot a bit of water server it doesn't go good it only takes a little to get in there but you can just put some things staple it to the rafters or anything if you have like an open basement and away you go uh to kind of just redirect it somewhere else other than dripping on there so it's it's one of those things that cost you very little from a build standpoint this you paid more for anything else than the rack just about uh than than the ten dollars you spent to throw a little plastic up to redirect it and uh it just has to be at a sloping angle because most things are small drips i mean other than major emergencies but it'll probably save you quite a bit it's the little things when you're building these little things and the things you didn't expect would ever be a problem like uh one day i'll give you guys the story of my um ps5 incident with the smart plugs to talk about a random thing that would happen um there's always some fun things to discover with home lab that'll teach you about um things you wouldn't normally even think to think about yep the um a few other comments back to the you know kind of wrap up the topic of virtualization though there is a really cool tool called lab gopher um if you want to use it it's it's for hunting down deals on ebay um the other thing too if you you know mentioning true nas there's a lot of companies out there that kind of cater towards the free nasty ass market and if you type those in on ebay you can find some pretty good deals on especially super micro systems that are already in the mode you want because one of the questions comes up like oh cool i want to load zfs with proxmox on this system but the dell raid controller won't let me do it because zfs wants to talk natively to the hard drives when you're buying a server like that you want to make sure you have something they may refer to it as it mode or pass-through mode there's going to be different nomenclature for this but essentially you want raw access if you type in green ass on ebay you'll actually find um determine the name of the company there's one of them that's really popular but you'll find a lot of places that offer them already in that mode because if not you'll end up down the rabbit hole of the person who has the videos um how to re-flash firmware on some of these systems which in itself is super tedious unix surplus that was the name of the company i was trying to think of we've actually purchased things from munich surplus i have no affiliation with them i have no offer code or anything but we have had good experience buying from unix surplus on ebay some server equipment we needed that was super micro and i've actually learned the hard way about the mode of the raid card because i didn't think about it when i ordered a dell server one time and i ended up going on ebay and sure enough forgot the name of the individual but but literally all he does is just buy out these raid cards for probably ridiculously cheap and then just puts a small markup on him after he puts them in the correct mode for trueness and i bought a few of those and it was perfect yep yeah uh someone said hba yes hbas which there's there's different ways you can hear it phrased the most important part is you want the drives to have full control and one thing nice in unix surplus list this out in their listings on ebay if you type in free nas you'll find some of their devices and you'll they'll tell you it's already in that mode which is great because if that's your goal is to have that the other side that's important as well when you're looking at and we'll use dell as an example because i really i really like the dell servers um used and because they're easy to find parts for but one of the things about the dell servers one they're usually on hardware compatibility lists so they're easy to find support for you know for xc png and proxmox as well two they are um they have better idrac systems in it so you don't need a kvm so as long as you get like the higher end idrac system that allows you to do the lights out management um and thank you danielle kirk says for maximum home lab compatibility we'll go with hp versus dell versus super micro now hp i'll take a little contention with and the reason why they have some of the worst boot times ever when you're using hp um i've used them i they have ridiculously long times that they sit there booting i i don't know why they seem to be less popular than the dell models but if you you can't pass up if you've got a good deal i'm not going to fault you in using one because i was using one because we got a really good deal from a company that went out of business and we used to have a couple of them a few years back i was always i loathe rebooting them remotely because i'm like oh god i know this is going to be a long time before this is back it just sat for like three minutes on the boot screen every time and the dell takes a little while themselves but if you look at ones and this does include this super micro as long as you get a newer one you don't have to use a stupid java interface i think it's idrac seven and beyond google this uh because i didn't google this before the show they offer a html5 kvm and that makes your life so much easier of not having to sit in front of the server and get things done this is a big advantage that server hardware has now you can buy this and build it yourself by the way there's uh asrock the company that makes motherboards makes a line called as rack and the asracline has the the newer ones i should say have uh the ip based kvms so you can remotely control those with no monitor plugged into it and that way you have the ability to get into the bios do all the setup and do everything and it just works really well i like super micro and dell a lot yes i like what one thing i do like about super micro more than dell um because even if you did get the html5 version of the idrac the remote console with your dell i just like the ipmi and super micro more i just think it's more user it's just more user-friendly um that doesn't mean that idrac is hard by any case it's really not it's just i love the interface i feel like it's more responsive and easier to get to things but you're not going to be you're going to be served well with the dell server upon not intended but i guess it works but um the whole thing is like um i just prefer super micro in that regard but they're so close i mean i just have a soft spot for dell i think because i when i first started in the industry that's what the company i worked at used so i have this kind of like familiarity with those but super micro to me seems to boot the fastest of the three that were asked so i don't really care so much though if i have to wait three minutes that's fine i'll just play my nintendo switch while i'm waiting you know um it doesn't really matter to me so much but if you're you know have a line of people in your house at your um office door because your plex server is down maybe you might care about speed at that point um but i think dell and super micro are um really really good i haven't really used hp to have an opinion so i defaulted tom's opinion on that yeah someone said i said it wrong and i they're probably right it's asrock rack i thought it was called i've seen people call it a s rack but i think it's the actual name of it is it's the asrock company and they make a rack board that has it so it's as rock rack you know how many people abbreviate things in i.t that sometimes you just assume that it's abbreviated because everything else is and it's just human nature just kind of draw the conclusion so that's a pretty easy mistake to make i think um someone said idrac needs a license now unless dell changed it um dell's i mean if you buy a dell that has the pro idrac that has that feature to my understanding the license is perpetual with it it's part of the server i that i know of it doesn't have renewals i could be wrong if they've changed it but at least the servers we have have perpetual licenses on them but i i don't know if they have a newer version that doesn't have a perpetual license but yes something to look at is whether or not you get idrac or idrac pro it's only the idac pro i believe that still ships with the actual ipmi interface on there or ipmi plus the kv kvm as long as you have the new version um or is it called dell enterprise maybe it's not called pro it's called enterprise it's the it's the higher end version of the idrac but my understanding is it's a it's a perpetual license um well i think when in doubt if you're getting it off of ebay for example which is a very common place to buy these ask the person you're buying it from if the idrac is accessible and working just having it isn't enough every time i've purchased a dell server i've never needed to buy a license and that could be because either a there before they made a change or b they just had that purchased with the original order when the server was first produced and i just took advantage of something that was already there i'm not really sure but that is a question you can ask and i had one server that didn't have idrac at all and i just purchased the idrac separately from an individual on ebay and and they must have done whatever he's doing to make that work because it worked immediately when i installed it so yeah and i see someone men a couple people mention it's called idrac enterprise and it's a lifetime option that's my thought it's it came with a perpetual license on there yeah it's idrec express or idrac enterprise those are the two different variations you want the enterprise one and frequently from a price standpoint when you're buying it you if you're buying a new server that's a big price upgrade from a used server yeah you can you can usually find it as not you won't find a huge price difference on ebay between the two servers all the time but you'll find a usage difference too dramatically so get the enterprise one if you want those features love to see raspberry pi replace idrac as uh mentioned um that's happened actually yeah i did a video on this very recently as either last i think it was last week actually um i forget because often i i have videos recorded a few weeks ahead of ahead of time it's called the tiny pilot kvm and it was um you know disclaimer it was sent to me for free by the manufacturer the individual making them because he wants the uh you know exposure but honestly if i hated it i would have just sent it back and i never would have did a video on it i loved it and in fact my xe png server is using it because it's a that server is actually my old filio desktop and i decided to use that as a test server so what i did was um you have ssh access to the tiny pilot kvm so i installed wake on lan on that so i can have that felio desktop now server shut shut itself down and whenever i want to spin it up to test xcpng i just ssh into the tiny pilot i issue the wake on lan command and then i go to the web console for the tiny pilot and i have the screen i can use the keyboard on that and that allows that desktop which wouldn't normally have anything ipmi or otherwise to now have something that's every bit as good the only feature it doesn't have is you can't attach like an iso image to it like you can with idrac and ipmi but the developer has told me that he is working on adding support for iso images he didn't give me a timeline or any kind of eta but he said that that's his current priority to get that working so just keep in mind if you purchase one you will not have support for iso image booting but he's looking into making that a possibility so if you're looking for that you could buy one i'm pretty sure it's open source so if i'm not mistaken he um you could just build your own if you just download the code and you have a pie so just take a look there's tiny pilot kvm it's pretty cool yeah because they're selling it together as a product i've looked at it because i think craft computing did a video on it as well i looked at it and it's they sell it as a kit so for those of you that go i just want it to work and then they sell it as a bunch of pieces and a list with some software for those of us that want to tinker so and i am going to be buying another server um pretty soon i haven't decided i've decided if i'm going to build it or um just purchase one outright i'll probably use lab gopher to be honest and i'm going to buy another tiny pilot kvm for it because i want to support that i think it's a great thing and honestly even if it comes with ipmi i kind of like the tiny pilot maybe i'll just use it yeah i use i lose the iso booting but it's cool to support that project and um yeah i do like it so i think i'm going to actually buy another tiny pilot and that's the downside too is that you have one tiny pilot per server which means you have to buy one per server he did mention i forgot the guy's name sorry but he mentioned he wants to look into a way to where you could have one tiny pilot and then you could have multiple attachments for all your servers so you don't have to buy one per server but right now it's a one-to-one kind of thing well uh two questions someone asked if it supports vga or is it only hdmi it does if you have an hdmi to vga dongle like you would use with anything else all you have to do is plug that into the hdmi port and then you could use vga and it um that's the recommended approach if that's something you want to do uh another option jay this might be kind of a fun one is you can buy on ebay um some of these use kvms like the physical ones physical kvms that plug into a monitor and that plug that into all your servers and then control that with the pi kvm so now you can use one pi kvm and a lot of them have a keyboard shortcut that will switch between the servers so you remote into the pi kvm the pi kvm connects to a physical kvm that then allows you the multiple switching between all the other systems that's a really good idea actually i didn't think about that that um those are cheap on ebay i well i have a box full of kvms that i don't use because there you go well the thing is i have really bad experiences with them that i don't think will matter for this because i notice with every single kvm i've ever purchased i don't know why this is it'll introduce flickr to my display on my desktop and it just ends up being terrible but i don't care about that on the server a flicker once in a while is not going to bother me at all so i'll just use one of those on there that might just be the thing i needed so thank you you saved me i mean i might still buy another one to support the project but i don't have to um that's probably a good idea yeah that'd be pretty cool well you've listened to an episode of well episode one because we did episode zero so this is one so depending if you count from zero or not i'll let you guys have the debate offline but uh yeah uh we're this is going to be um for those of you watching this on youtube right now we did buy a domain and we're setting this up to be a podcast we'll let everyone know once it starts getting published for now it's just going to live here on youtube we do plan to continue to do this on youtube but then it'll also be for those of you that want to just listen to it we're going to we're getting all the back end situated for podcasting podcasting's a little bit trickier on the back end there's b and g had a good conversation there's a lot more to do too yeah it's not like youtuber we just hit live and go but we're also trying to do it in a smart way i've seen a lot of podcasts out there and no no shade you know because it works for them but they would spin up like a separate irc server and then they have to do multiple versions of it and we're trying to get it down to um you know publish as people times as possible have any spoilers yeah oh do we lose jay on your local podcast catcher whatever you use you should be able to search for it once we have that done so um yeah we'll let you know absolutely so thanks everyone who came and joined us and uh oh let me think uh oh uh you can find me at lawrences.com and you can find him at learnlinux.tv same domain as the channel keeping it simple yup he keeps it simple i do too

Channel: Lawrence Systems

Views: 29,121

Keywords: lawrencesystems

Id: iRmXLUmsQjQ

Length: 60min 34sec (3634 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 10 2021