Downsizing my Home Lab to a SINGLE PC

I too have a problem.

Awesome; I enjoy videos like this, nice one!

I'm getting a ton of value out of an old r610. Theyre cheap on ebay. Mine has dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5620 @ 2.40GHz which give me 16 threads. Upgraded the HBA to H200 flashed into IT mode to let the OS (Ubuntu Server 22.04) manage the array of 6 1tb 2.5" HHD's. System boots off a 256gb scandisk ssd. Plan on upgrading the cpus and then the RAM to at least 64gb though it maxs out at 384gb.

I loved the humor In this! I snagged the 9th Gen big brother of the base system for $100 last week and have been trying to figure out some uses for it. This is very helpful

I can't tell if everything you're saying is a question or a statement.

Would a 7840HS + 64 GB DDR5 + no discrete GPU make more sense as a ready-made product if you don't have 3.5" HDDs and/or use M2 NVME 4-8TB drives? Bunch of them around 750$ at online retailers, 2x2.5 Gbps, unreal CPU & RAM power, decent integrated graphics and if DDR5 can be bumped at 6400 Mhz or higher (5600 stock) - it would actually make a difference (e.g. +R9 7940HS). Removing pcie wifi card may yield a slow albeit useful m2 sata slot for 4 TB cheap SSD. BIOS would just die on you right about then.

ive done this before with mini pcs... serves as a standalone mobile lab. or a really cool mobile streaming setup

I think for GPU, you can still go for cheaper Nvidia Quadro series. Some still has single slot, low profile, can still game and most importantly have hardware encoder if you plan to make cloud/remote gaming server.

opnsense all the way :-)

I love the cool transition

Dude, this took me back, way back, to 1991. I had a 386sx. I used it to host a BBS as well as use it for my Turbo C coding and compile environment for college. I had 4 meg of RAM and 40 Meg of HDD. (Not a typo.) I don't think you're as old as me, but something tells me, you can relate to those specs, if only from having learned about them in school. Great video. I spent my career as a back end guy, mostly BI and Data Warehouse systems. I'll admit, I should have a home server, but after 27 years of living the "dream" I fell back into my old hobby of Flight Sims, X-Plane and MSFS, and picked up writing fiction to satisfy that old creativity itch I used to scratch with coding. Great video, I'm a subscriber now.

I start with one PC, now I have full 2 racks, and I consireding going back to the PC :D

Refurbished storage devices are not something I would ever buy. Anything else, fine.

Awesome video, I've been doing something similar without proxmox, just running Truenas core and a bunch of jails/VMs on my old i5-3570-PC with a few upgrades.

But I have a few questions that maybe the fine and more knowledgable people here can help me with. Since I'm moving my hardware into a new location I thought maybe the time has come to upgrade to proper server hardware, a Supermicro H11 with a decent EPYC CPU and ECC Ram. A used system would cost me just over a $1200, but what I don't know is how the power consumption will change to my system now. The only metric that I can find is TDP, which to my understanding doesn't mean much in terms of actual consumption. Energy prices here are high and will remain so for the foreseeable future. I plan on running Truenas, Nextcloud, a minecraft server or two, and a few VMs with Collabora, Home Assistant etc. I've got an H11SSL-i with a EPYC 7502 and 128GB of RAM on my watchlist right now. Would this make sense for a homeserver?

How important is ECC? I've not had any problems without it so far, but it's a feature I think is quite important in a storage system, or am I wrong here?

Any help appreciated, thx!

Proof of Concept: Confirmed.

Building my own homelab entirely out of aliexpress specials like machinist x99rs9. Paid 160€ for a 14C/28T Xeon, the board and 64GB of ECC RAM. No Quicksync, but I don't really need it.

One place where you could have saved money is storage, obviously. That 60gb SATA SSD is fine for Proxmox, used 256gb and 512gb SATA SSDs are dirt cheap right now. NVMe not so much, and while I do have one to fill the slot my board had, I don't think one really needs it. We want flash for the low latency and high IOPs, and even older SATA ones are plenty fast for any playground.

I have a separate (xpenology) NAS around already, so I would consider running some stuff directly off that (NFS) if pressed for space and will definitely run my backups there. A cheap 1-drive NAS (used, like a Synology DS115 for example) with a single used 8TB drive would be a cheap alternative. Yes if that drive fails yada yada - it's just the backup and some containers I still have the recipes for!

Managing expectations also means managing paranoia. If what you're making must be online 4-5 nines then of course this won't ever be cheap. But if it's a lab you probably wanted to try a new version anyway...

👍👍👍👍👍👍

There are SO MANY used electronics out there. You could have got a NIC with more ports for the same price. and you could have got a low profile GTX 1050 for the price as well. I Rarely buy new anymore except for solid state memory.

Do you have vlans in your network?

I wonder how a Lenovo p520 would have fared price wise when considering things like RAM upgrade, onboard m.2 and ability to get a better full size gpu

You can lab and virtualize anything these days if study is your reason for having equipment. I got a full CCIE with zero hardware besides a beefy PC running GNS3, VMware Workstation, and Cisco Packet Tracer (granted I had millions of dollars of equipment I touched every day at work)

New 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th Intel Core i3 Processors are much faster and effecient than the old Office Hardware CPU's. I replaced my 90 Watt Office Desktop Server with 3770 i7 with a 13th i3 and have power drops lower than 40 Watts with 4x 3.5" HDD's this is Power reduction of more than 50% on idle! Power usage is really a thing this dayZ!

downsizing or consolidating ???

Similar consolidation that I just did was getting 5 $50 mini-PCs, a $10 TP-Link switch, and a Synology NAS. The reason for this is because some people just give away a blank Synology if it doesn't have storage, but if you already have hard drives then it works well. I have two 6TB hard drives I've had for a while that I put in the NAS for long-term storage and back up my ProxMox nodes. The 4 mini-PCs have 250GB SSDs each that you can get for free from microcenter during their promotion. So all total I have about $300 in a small "server".

All plugged in to the same switch, they can be VLAN'd off and I 3D printed a mount for them all with the switch so it's just one singular box with a few power cables coming out. But, if one node completely fails me, like it lights itself on fire and I can't fix it, I still have 4 other nodes to pick up the pace until I get that node replaced with any other mini-pc.

Works well for me!

I nod, while pondering where to stuff that last server into my 48u enclosure...

Virtualizing PFSense for the internet is rough when you need to take the server down for maintenance. That pushed me to do a Proxmox cluster - migrate the VM to another host first and I can work on the hardware in peace. IDK if I'll bother with full HA.

I use a 9010 for my plex and all my docker apps but still have a nas and a proliant dl380 gen9 for when i want to turn it on and host a server for something.

ooof you built trash lol.

Why you need to buy hosting to run minecraft server if you have 2 home servers

Well done video sir. This kind of info is great for people who are kinda serious about getting into homelab. Not too cheap, but keeping it realistic. I started 10 years ago with 2 HP D530s. Gotta start somewhere!

Once you're in the game, you can't leave. Everyone comes back. I've downsized and upsized half a dozen a times. :D

Using a Dell Precision T5600 Workstation , fully loaded. Does all the jobs it needs too.....

Power bill will warmly thanks you

Greate idea. I have similar. Thanks.

i managed to not understand any of this server stuff but stayed hyped up

Great video. I had a $150 HP Z2 mini G3 I76700, 16GB RAM, 256gb NVME, 1TB 5.2K HDD, that has been my server I recently when to ebay and bought some old server grade stuff, 96GB of EEC RAM, 9 10K SAS 600GB HDDs, Quadro K4200, HP DL360G9 with dual Xeon E5-2620, Cisco 3560 PoE, and C897VA-K9 all for about $500. It will be interesting to compare it once it arrives to your $800 build.

How much power consuption?

I bought a $55 thin client, and upgraded it slightly to an NVME and 12gb ram. Runs docker and a bunch of services :) you definitely don't need a big bunch of money, depending on what you're doing.

Finally shutdown the last of my old home lab hardware and am now running solely on the newer, much more power efficient, systems. The new lab is a 5 node Proxmox cluster with all SSD storage (NVMe for Host installation and SATA for VM data) configured in a Ceph cluster with 10Gb networking spread across 4 ports on each node. The reason for needing 5 nodes was to ensure I had enough RAM available as each node can only accept a maximum of 64GB of RAM as where I had 192GB RAM in each HP server.

So far the estimated amperage draw has dropped from 12A to bouncing between 4-5A. I should still be able to increase the efficiency by replacing some of the last older equipment still running.

Kept the Same:
x1 Dell Optiplex 7070 SFF
x1 Dell Optiplex 7040 SFF
x1 Cisco Catalyst 2960X (plan to replace with newer, more efficient, Ubiquiti switch)
x1 HP ProCurve 2810-24G (plan to replace with newer, more efficient, Ubiquiti switch)
x1 Ubiquiti US-8-60W
x2 APC Smart-UPS 2200 (SMT2200R2X658)
x1 RPi 3B+
x1 ControlByWeb X410 WebRelay (RTDs for server room [house mud room] temperature monitoring)
x1 Synology DS418

OLD Lab:
x3 HP Proliant DL380p Gen8 servers
x1 Dell PowerEdge R720
x1 NetApp DS4246 (12/24 drives loaded)
x1 NetApp DS2246 (24/24 drives loaded)
x1 Dell R710
x1 Delta Networks ET-DT7024 (Flashed with Dell PowerConnect 8024F firmware)
x1 HP ProCurve 2810-24G

NEW Lab:
x5 HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF
x1 Ubiquiti USW-EnterpriseXG-24

Why both kurbenetties cluster and portainer? I assume for the experience and education but is there another reason?

Man does this make wanna reconsider my two dual socket server setup that has a lot of RAM. But good to know I can downsize to at least 8 and 6 X99 stuff that is doing nothing.

I really liked this concept, I just built a HTPC based on the N100 that is also a NAS / Docker server for my applications, and I can even play retro games on it using RetroArch, just using Debian as a base system, no virtualization at all. And I'm very satisfied with the results so far.

Docker on top of a vm is interesting to me

I would love to see a deep dive on configuring the software. The game server and proxmoxy especially. I wonder how this would run on a pi 5 or a zimaboard. how is the nvme drive used as cache? How to configure the pci nvme to work with proxmoxy? When I ran truenas on proxmox it was a resource hog.

I came by just to say that i will take all that stuff

I love these little boxes. They're waaaay more than suitable as a home server and a few SBs have caught on to that idea a year ago when I was trying this out on hardware that rides the line. Turns out I don't need much and I really mean that.

Athlon 64, 2GB DDR2, ~20TB storage, 10GbE SFP..✓💯 Works out great.

Something like a multicore chip with onboard graphics would be like a rocket. Anything made within the past 3-6 years would definitely be put to better use as a workstation but you get the idea. There's a few lines to be drawn for this and that. It's best to define them and then build based around that.

I started doing this in 22 and got so much push back from male colleagues using mini PCs. It's dang near impossible being ahead of the crowd as a women leader in tech. I regret nothing and love the huge drop in energy waste.

You know, Sparkle has a new single slot A310 card that would fit. It wouldn't call it a barn burner, but it'll fit atleast.

"I don't have a chair..."

Any chance we might see a video on iKoolcore's R2 anytime soon? Would love to see a similar video with this!! Also, curious to why you picked proxmox over unraid. Love your content! Super helpful!!