Building my home Lab.

#proxmox #homelab #server #infrastructure

Greetings!

This is my first post here in Dev.to, this community is amazing and I always find help here by reading tutorials, tricks and tips. I hope with this post I can help and inspire you to start your own home lab.

Before we start, the bible verse of the day:

"Cast all your anxiety on Him because He cares for you. 1 Peter 5-7"

Thank you Jesus for being present in my life and allowing me to share this knowledge.

Why do I need a home lab?

A few reasons…

1. Hardware is cool!
I was participating in a round of interviews to hire a new co-op intern and I was surprised that nobody knows anything about hardware anymore. Cloud makes everything so easy that the new generations don’t even know what is going on the infrastructure below the code.

2. Cheaper than cloud?!?
If you choose wisely and resist the temptation to have the best and shiny new computer, building your home lab will be cheaper than the cloud solutions.

3. Learning opportunities
Once you have your lab environment set up, it is easy to play, learn and experiment without any worries that you will break a production system.

My Home LAB Server

This is the most exciting part for me. I love hardware and I am constantly looking for bargains on the marketplace.

What you should keep in mind when choosing the right hardware:

It is not gaming! Speed doesn’t matter that much. Stable is better than fast.
Old used enterprise hardware offers good value / performance.
Upgradable hardware gives you more opportunities.
Keep it simple, keep it cheap. This is for learning!

1. My Hardware - HP DL380 G9
I found on facebook marketplace a DL 380 G9 on a very good deal.

Dual CPU E5-2690 v3 (24 cores / 48 threads).
128GB DDR4
5 drives 300GB SAS.

The Server:

All of this for 200 maple dollars!!!

It is worthy mentioning:

It is a bit power hungry, it averages 110W.
It is noisy. Keep it in a basement or separate room.

2. Upgrades.
I could use this hardware the way it is for a lot of things. If you are on a budget there is no need to do any upgrade at all.

I know that my use case will be learning openshift and this application requires a faster disk and maybe networking. So I added the following hardware to my server.

2x 128GB SSD disk for OS (CAD $32.98).
Patriot SSD
2x 1TB SSD disk for fast storage (CAD $137.98).
Timetec SSD
1x 256GB NVME drive on a PCI adapter for even more fast storage. (CAD $ 26.49 + 17.59)
nvme PCI adaptor
nvme Drive
1x LOM PCI 10G network card. (CAD $ 18.71)
HP 560FLR

Total of upgrades CAD $233.75

Server Configuration

1. Configure the iLO (IPMI)
Most of the enterprise level servers come with a management interface called IPMI. iLO for HP, iDRAC for Dell and so on… this interface is very helpful because it allows us to manage the server remotely. This will be very handy when I get my noisy server in the basement very far from my ears.

If you don't have the IP and password for the IPMI interface, you will need to connect a keyboard and monitor and log into BIOS.

Each server is different. You need to research your own model.

2. Network Connections
I just connected at this time the iLO port and the first ethernet adapter to my switch.

3. Accessing the iLO
Now that you have the network setup, you can access you iLO using the web browser. This will allow is to remote manage and configure our disks.