Hello everyone, I am building a house, and I want to have a very good HomeLab for it, I want to connect all the home automation (Home Assistant) that will be enough, cameras with frigate or something similar, media server with Plex or Jellyfin (4k transcoding and about 4 simultaneous users), with their containers .arr, more containers for different purposes etc, something powerful and if possible that does not have a very high consumption. I have already thought about the routers and swich that will be Unify with POE ports to connect cameras, access points and others, the biggest doubt is the Hardware for the HomeLab. I would like it to be all in Rackmount format with more than 4 bays for hard drives, a powerful processor like an i7 13gen.
Could someone give me a little guidance to see how to do it? Hardware, chassis etc? I’m not very clear and do not know how to follow.
Thank you very much in advance and greetings.
Well, since you’re going rackmount, bite the bullet and grab some enterprise gear for your VMs and containers. I run a HPE DL380 G10, and you can get them fairly inexpensively. The biggest cost driver in them on the grey market is RAM. Theyre surprisingly efficient for home use and will last forever. I have some G5’s that I ran for about 7 years and even though they sit on a warehouse rack in storage these days, they still run perfectly fine.
For my NAS and SAN, I run a Supermicro 847 Chassis, which is 36 LFF bay, with an X11 mobo running TrueNAS Scale. This setup allows me to create multiple large arrays, for NAS I have an SMB share that stores all my media for Plex, another array thats an iSCSI SAN feeding the VMWare stack, and yet another for local backups, all from one box with plenty of room for expansion.
Even with cloud backup services, its good to keep a local copy of everything live, and a local backup, so you can always find a need for more storage, good to have plenty of room to grow from the beginning.
Many ways to go about setting up shop. Some design considerations are gonna be do you want just enough to run the home, or do you want significant space beyond that to truly lab and play with tech? Server platforms will run VMWare, Nutanix, ProxMox far better than a desktop platform will, and are worth the bit of power consumption increase. I prefer the two box approach, separating compute from storage, because as much as I like the HPE DL platform, for home use I dont wanna be locked into buying HP branded disks any time I want to add storage. With the TrueNAS box I can add whatever disk I want and either expose it directly to the network, or add it as another LUN to the hypervisor datastore.
Rack gear is designed to move a lot of air. Ideally they need to be in their own closet away from people as much as possible, not only for the noise, but for the fact that people create dust and servers will suck that dust in and coat everything inside with it. To keep your gear running well, keep it away from people
As for network and security, you said youre looking at Unifi - Ubiquiti has a decent ecosystem for the average prosumer. As long as youre not planning to expose services to the internet you should be fine with that gear. If youre wanting a more robust network security solution, youd want to look into Firewalla, pfSense, OPNsense, or perhaps SonicWall
Thank you very much for your answer
I think I’m going to decide for a dual Nuc or miniPc configuration to run both VMs and Docker containers and then build a storage box with TRUENAS, what I’m not clear is what Hardware to use for this box, I want something relatively cheap since I’m only going to use it as storage and RAID, all the other processes will use the miniPC capabilities.
Could you advise me what hardware to use for this?
Thank you very much