My Homelab has grown a lot in 4 years. I’ve been looking through old photos, trying to find pictures of the lab in every shape and form.
Boy, looking back at this. The R710 on the floor is not plugged in. It’s just there to hold the floor down :). Simple days.
On the bottom, there’s a Dell R720XD with 12x10TB Drives, 2x1TB SSD in the rear bays, 2TB SSD connected to the internal USB port via USB to SATA connector. On the motherboard there are 2 SATA ports, but for some reason Dell disabled them on the R720XD. So I had to use the internal USB for booting because I wanted to pass the HBA through to a TrueNAS VM.
Above that, Dell R720 with 8x10TB Drives, 2TB SSD connected to the internal SATA port (the cable you need can be purchased here) for boot, and some VM storage. ESXI here as well, with TrueNAS VM, among others.
The black mini-tower, man what a little engine that could. I have an Quattro P GPU installed, it’s an AMD AM4 CPU, with 16GB Ram, dual 3TB HDs. This was my Plex server. Plus ran a few other things. Never broke a sweat with 20+ Plex streams, plus a pretty busy mariaDB running (At it’s retirement, the DB alone was 25 million rows). Then there’s the HTPC case — That was just running some distro of Linux and was just a terminal for everything. I don’t remember the specs.
THere are the two Supermicro’s, they were running pfSense and Vyos. The tower on the floor, ran Proxmox, and was just for playing. I did the heavy lifting on the Dell’s, and boy, were they pushing. Before we finally expanded, the CPU stayed at 95% utilization, memory was completely utilized. It got to the point that we needed to deploy another VM to handle a different function of a family members business. I could not deploy a Windows VM. Well, I could, but.. It wasn’t nice. I put my foot down. No more. Time to upgrade. Thus started my journey with the Cisco UCS line of servers..
This got me thinking, man I wish I could go back to my first or second homelab. Here is me showing my age, but I had a Commodore 64c that I ran a BBS on. I saved money for a few years and finally had enough to start my MajorBBS. I had 3 computers, and at the height of my BBS, 16 modems. All the phone lines came into the house near the living room, so in a corner I had a table with all the modems, the computer, and ran a long coax cable back to my room so I could connect via the IPX/SPX protocol. I charged access to the BBS — nothing outrageous but I made enough to keep paying the phone bills, plus add more games, etc. Back then, games for MajorBBS could cost $500.
Or, the homelab I had while in college. This is way back in the 90s. I had this 4-shelf rack that I got from Home Depot. Had computers sitting on the shelves. Some, just motherboards, with ISA cards sticking out for network and video, with my ISDN Dual Channel connection, and a /26 routable IPs. You couldn’t tell me nothing. These were the days where you left your system wide open on the net. I even had an old DECstation, complete with 21″ Monitor (again, this was 1997ish).
I’m still looking for more pictures. As I find them, I’ll post them and stories behind them. I have many stories about this version of the lab as well. I’m hoping I can find versions from before this. You’d be amazed, and understand why I call this my ghetto homelab. Before I thought about doing this, I remember seeing a photo of my lab from 2018s. For the life of me can’t find it. But I will. Until then…