Homelab Setup: Part 1

I learned a lot from my previous homelab, but due to reasons I will get into later, I’ve decided to start fresh. As I am restarting my homelab, I want to document what I am doing and why, so that I can re-visit this document and make changes as I find things I like, and as I make mistakes.

Why start from scratch?

Well, that begins with my current homelab setup. Currently, I am running a single Dell PowerEdge R740, with:

• CPU: 48 cores (2 x Intel Xeon)
• Memory: 512 GB of ECC RAM
• Storage: 4 x 512 GB SAS HDD

Now, although I love these specs as it’s kind of overkill for what I am doing, it comes at the cost of consuming a lot of power (~300W IDLE) — it also makes a lot of noise due to both the fans and the PSU. To make matters worse, the server was originally ordered with only 8 x 2.5” SAS slots. As such, adding any more storage to the server becomes increasingly difficult and expensive (unless I want to take the risk shucking drives to get a better price).

Changes made

Based on the way I did things before, I want to makes some changes. First being the hypervisor I chose. When I first did things, I chose VMware ESXI as my hypervisor — now, although I enjoyed this hypervisor, finding material (or tutorials) online seemed quite hard. Proxmox seems to be what the homelab community uses, so I’ll be going with that!