Home Lab
Home Lab: DNS Resolution
Some details on the hosts and setup: The Home Lab: 2022 Edition. Info This is a living document, and is subject to change at any given time. Last updated December 7th, 2022. DNS Resolution # DNS Resolution Flow
Home Lab: Physical Network Diagram
Some details on the hosts and setup: The Home Lab: 2022 Edition. Info This is a living document, and is subject to change at any given time. Last updated December 7th, 2022. Physical Network # Physical Network Cabling # Physical Cabling
Home Lab: Services & Software
Some details on the hosts and setup: The Home Lab: 2022 Edition. Info This is a living document, and is subject to change at any given time. Last updated March 24th 2024. Services # Service Deployment Method Description VMware vCenter VM VMware vSphere Management VMware Aria Suite Lifecycle Manager VM Aria Lifecycle Management Home Assistant VM Home Automation Plex VM Media Server Pi-Hole VM x 2 DNS and Adblocking Owncloud VM File sync services Plausible Container (Docker01) Web analytics Caddy 2 VM Reverse proxy / File services Tautulli Container on Synology Plex Monitoring Calibre Web Container on Synology Web front end for Calibre Bar Assistant Container (Docker02) Bar Management System Portainer Container (Docker01) Container Management DNS Synology Domain Name Service DHCP Synology / Unifi IP assignment VPN Unifi Remote network access Other Software # Software Description Plex Update Script to keep Plex updated automatically Diagrams #Containers with Caddy Frontend #
My new lab is based on Dell OptiPlex 7090 UFF hosts and after enabling vSAN on the four node cluster, the first two hosts I set up started having issues, especially with the cache devices. It seems that they just disappear from the host, especially when doing IO-intensive operations like changing the vSAN policy for a few VMs from RAID-1 to RAID-5. Once the host is rebooted, the device is back in place, seemingly without issues until the next time it disappears. Strangely this was not a problem before I configured vSAN, and only used the same devices as local datastores.
My Current Home Lab Setup 2023
Christian’s Homelab setup #Some details on the hosts and setup: The Home Lab: 2022 Edition. vSAN 8 Setup details: vSAN 8.0 ESA in my Home Lab Info This is a living document, and is subject to change at any given time. Last updated april 29th, 2024. VMware vSphere Infrastructure #vCenter Version: 8.0u2c | 8.0.2.00300, Build: 23504390 ESXi version: 8.0c, Build: 21493926 ESXi Hosts # Hostname Version Model esxi-11 8.0.1, Build 21495797 Dell OptiPlex 7090 UFF esxi-12 8.
For years now my homelab has been a single Dell Precision T7500 host, with a total of 24 GB RAM and a few TB of locally attached disks. I also had a small Synology DS216play and a very old HP MicroServer N36L that I ran FreeNAS on. A few months back, the MicroServer decided to call it quits after many, many years of service (it was released in May 2010!). To replace it I got ordered a new Synology DS920+, which again forced me into have a proper look at my entire home lab environment. The conclusion was very clear; My home lab environment was in dire need of a complete overhaul!
To make a long story short, I ended up with a pretty odd choice of new hosts for my home lab!