What's Hiding in the Nest? My Home Lab

Every home lab starts innocently. Maybe you want somewhere to store a few files or run one small service. Then, somehow, you end up with a cluster, managed networking, and a suspicious increase in power consumption—and your electricity bill.

Mine is no exception. Here is the hardware currently hiding in the nest.

Storage: the big box

At the centre of the lab is a Dell workstation running TrueNAS Community Edition, serving NFS, iSCSI, and SMB shares to the lab. It has:

• an Intel Core i7 processor
• 64 GB of RAM
• 1 TB M.2 SATA SSD for the OS
• 2 × 1 TB SSDs in a mirrored special VDEV for metadata
• 2 × 12 TB WD hard drives in a mirrored data VDEV

It is the largest machine in the setup and looks after the data. The mirrored data VDEV provides roughly 12 TB of usable capacity, which sounds enormous until you discover how creative a home lab can be at filling disks.

Compute: the tiny Proxmox cluster

The compute side is a three-node Proxmox VE cluster:

• 2 × Dell OptiPlex Mini PCs, each with a 6th-generation Intel Core i5 and 16 GB of RAM
• 1 × Lenovo ThinkPad T480s with an 8th-generation Intel Core i5 processor and 24 GB of RAM

Yes, one of the cluster nodes is a laptop. It already has a screen, keyboard, and built-in UPS—also known as a battery—so I would argue it is simply a very compact server with opinions.

An APC UPS from Schneider Electric provides power protection for the lab during outages.

Networking: keeping everything connected

An EdgeRouter X currently handles routing, although I will probably replace it with OPNsense soon. A managed 1 Gb/s Netgear switch connects the whole collection together and gives the machines somewhere to exchange packets and gossip about my configuration choices.

What is all this running?

Quite a lot. The cluster hosts a growing collection of LXC containers and virtual machines, but they deserve more than a rushed list at the bottom of this post.

That tour is coming in the next episode—along with the services, the setup, and probably a few explanations of why I needed another container.