Post Your Homelab

General
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Curious what everyone runs for a homelab. Morpheus sits between most any cloud type, so you can really get by with a mix of physical or public cloud.

I however, host several websites and gaming servers in my spare time. So I built my on-prem robust enough that I can spin up really anything I need to test without any additional costs besides a few shekels here or there for power.

Routing

Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro

Switching

Ubiquiti 48 port 1Gbps switch
Ubiquiti 8 port POE 1Gbps switch
Ubiquiti 8 port 10Gbps aggregation switch
(4) Ubiquiti AP-AC-PRO access points

Servers/Storage

(3) Dell R620s w/ All-Flash

Hypervisor(s)/Cloud(s)

ESXi 7.x w/ VSAN
Hyper-V
AWS
GCP
Azure

She ain’t pretty, but she’s mine…

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Waiting for an upgrade in housing (living in a tiny apartment) so I can finally put a rack. Mine is a little bit more modest.

Right now:

Routing

1x Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite 3-Poort Router

Switching

1x Netgear GS116Ev2

Servers

3x Intel NUCs
1x Intel NUC dedicated for Morpheus Installation

Storage

Self built ASRock C2750D4I, currently a 4U anchor with total of 48TB raw storage

Hypervisor(s)/Cloud(s)

XCP-ng 8.x
Breakout to AWS and GCP

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Oh interesting! I’ve tried the NUC route with ESXi, but ran into trouble trying to run VSAN on it and wanted to stay away from external arrays.

I’ll have to check out XCP-ng, that’s the first I’ve seen that come up!

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Works just the same as XenServer. So it has it’s drawbacks. There should be a near 1:1 compatibility with XenServer. I’ve been an avid XenServer user back in the day. When they moved a lot of free functionality behind their licensing models I switched to XCP-ng. And it’s fairly light compared to a fat VMware.

Not everything is simple and VMware works way better. An example would be using cloud-init. This is a straight up nightmare. However XenServer/XCP-ng is very scriptable, there’s a Python package called XenAPI. I do a lot of the heavy lifting with this package where XenServer falls short. By leveraging the agility of the platform I can achieve very good results even with this hypervisor.

External arrays, yeah. Must be something local here, but still fond of it. We often notice with our customers that, unless you are running a VMware ELA, regular vSAN software license costs can catapult your TCO to Pure Storage levels.

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That’s pretty impressive Chris! I use VirtualBox on a decent spec Mac to host an all-in-one. Works pretty well for testing stuff. Doesn’t make a great picture though :grinning: - hope all good.

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haha thanks! My lab originally started as a desktop and progressively through purchases and trades got to where it is.

I figured when I started working here I’d make a big investment on a lab and tell my wife work required it :wink:

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