I’ve spent countless hours staring into this giant metal box wondering “why doesn’t that thing just work?” only to realize I’m probably just exhausted and should go to sleep. But, I’ve always walked away with more experience than the day before.
My “little” homelab has become such a blast, and changes by the day. Yes, it’s not “little” in the sense of footprint, but it’s usually pulling just around 400W!
Currently, housed in a full depth half height Dell rack.
It houses:
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2x Dell R340’s
- Wortox my primary ESXi 8 host, who handles my Veeam and AD servers.
- Webber is my TrueNAS Core box, serving a mirror of SSD’s as an NFS datastore to vCenter, as well as a mirror of HDD’s for SMB shares and providing a storage target to Veeam.
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3x HP DL20’s
- Inky, Blinky, and Pinky. Who also participate in a DRS cluster in vSphere consuming the NFS datastore from Webber.
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Switches
- 2960s handling L2
- QNAP switch (don’t remember model right now, but has 2.5GbE and SFP+ for 10GbE)
- Brocade ICX7250 which I’m still setting up for L3 to take the intervlan routing load off of my OPNsense box and provide more SFP+ ports. Currently a RPi4 tucked in there that I use as a remote console server via SSH, which works great as I keep a static and leave it on wi-fi.
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THE BOX!
Last but not least is my HL15, which is a seriously awesome piece of craftsmanship. It feels great, looks great, and through some initial tests with SMB, PERFORMS GREAT!
I was seeing network speeds in Houston at 2.46Gbps running from my desktop through the firewall down to the box at just about wire speed!