2023 has been an interesting year getting new insights next to what I do professionally on a full-time basis. Yes, working with organizations on their cloud journey, in my case Microsoft Azure, is a lot of fun but there’s more than just the public cloud. Scenarios may exist that are not be really viable to run on public clouds. While I tried to limit the amount of having an infrastructure at home, the nerd/geek inside me woke up again wanting to run something at home. So the interest in having a home lab returned.
Some prerequisites needed were already present by means of having a home network using some decent equipment (in my humble opinion) using devices from Ubiquity.At time of writing, I use the following devices since I moved into this home in late 2020:
– Unify Dream Machine Pro
– Unifi US-16-150W switch
– 3 Unifi UAP-AC-IW access points
– 1 Unifi UAP-IW-HD access point
So, having such network equipment running a NAS, an HTPC and a work related laptop may be overkill and covers my needs quite a bit. So, why not having a home lab and start exploring multiple scenarios before deciding what to build myself?
After reading a lot of websites and extensive YouTube video sessions (man, there’s soooo much to find about the topic) I decided to go for something compact yet flexible.
The approach that really caught my attention was ‘Project TinyMiniMicro’ from Servethehome: https://www.servethehome.com/introducing-project-tinyminimicro-home-lab-revolution/
As I am not particularly interested in having a huge rack populated with 19 inch rack-mount servers (the Unifi equipment fits in my utility closet), this approach really suited me well. Nothing has changed much since the article regarding the availability of used/refurbished 1L PC’s. Plenty of them are available for a good price and they introduce lots of use cases next to home labs.
I purchased 3 HP Elitedesk 705 G4 boxes and 2 of them will be used for my home lab.The 3rd is used a emulation station for retro gaming running Batocera, but that’s outside the scope of this post.
I purchased some additional memory and SSD disks as the initial configuration was quite minimal, but the seller equipped both boxes with a 256 GB NVME SSD which I use a boot drive. The data disks chose may not be the fastest ones, but they were cheap and fit my needs.
As these boxes don’t have any KVM or Lights Management solution, I need to take them out nd put them back in if I need to do some hardware maintenance or reinstall the OS.
These are desktops so what do you expect?
After testing and installing the boxes I installed it in my utility closet. A perfect fit…
During the year, I’ve been trying out various software solutions to run on my home lab environment. With software solutions, I mean hypervisor. By lack of any interest, I ruled out Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere before investigating other solutions. I went for the KVM route using two methods of running the hypervisor:
1. Rocky Linux in conjunction with Cockpit
2. Proxmox Virtual Environment
Initially, I ran both machines as stand-alone. Eventually, I moved to Proxmox Virtual Environment running both machines in a cluster.
As I don’t have any requirements for failover, I chose to have the Virtual Machines and LXC Containers replicated and do some manual migration to the other node if maintenance is required that results into a reboot, i.e. after installing a new kernel.
This raises one issue: 2 cluster nodes insufficient for failover and cluster voting as at least 3 nodes are required and I don’t have a 3rd Proxmox machine available. Fortunately, some more YouTube sessions provided a solution using a Corosync Qdevice for voting purposes. How I managed to deploy that is part of part 2 of looking back at 2023.
Stay tuned!!!
Marc Westerink's blog 