I have had a few posts this year regarding the revival of the home lab. But we have progressed into this rabbit hole even further during the year of 2024.
State of the union
As we approach the end of 2024 and I am under strict instructions not to spend any more money, the current state of play is:
- 5 x Talos Kubernetes Nodes
- 5 x VMware vSphere Nodes
- 1 x Hyper-V Node
- 1 x Proxmox Node
- 2 x NAS devices
- 1 x 24port switch
In this post I am probably not going to be able to get into the software layer above and beyond the hypervisor or Kubernetes layer. But I will state that the reason for the home lab is to learn and get hands on with the technology I am talking about on a daily basis, as a Field CTO at Veeam Software a lot of that hands-on is with the Veeam portfolio of products.
Hardware
What started in January was a purchase of 3 of these Dell Optiplex ultra small form factor mini PCs, they have the Intel i5-8500T and we upgraded these to 32GB of RAM, this is the case for most of our units as you see the story unfold.
The intention of these 3 nodes was to build a Kubernetes cluster, we all need one of them at home right? I had started to learn about Talos as a secure Kubernetes distribution and I had already played around with this in a virtual vSphere environment and was impressed.
So much so I covered this in the 2024 edition of #90DaysOfDevOps
We then picked up a smart looking managed switch to add to our collection, we already had an existing 2 nodes covered in the opening posts that were running a vSphere environment but they were limited by the CPU they had. They do feature later on. We got things up and running at this stage with a 3 node Talos Kubernetes cluster.
The switch I am using and clearly we knew at this stage that expansion was on the cards… This switch is a 24 port Dell X1026 1GB managed switch. We are using this as a flat network switch today, but if I ever want to face my fear of networking then we may look into this down the line.
3 quickly became 5, and we had our bare metal cluster up and running.
This was alongside the two vSphere hosts that you can just about see on the bottom shelf to the left. We are also rocking some antique NAS devices from NETGEAR, I have had these many a year and they have served me well but they are the bottleneck to everything we do in the lab, if any storage vendor would like to sponsor a blog and supply me with a new unit then let me know. I have detailed the specs of these in the posts above.
I have mentioned that the current vSphere hosts were not really getting the job done, they had only a celeron CPU and something was stopping certain workloads from running, the specific one I remember was MongoDB running on top of a vSphere Tanzu Kubernetes virtual cluster just would not start with that architecture. Fast forward to August 2024 and we made a massive change to the lab.
I went and found over facebook marketplace, ebay and some other second hand/refurb computer sites and picked these up to bolster the virtualisation game in the lab and replace those sub par ESXi hosts. Same spec Dell Optiplex 7060 units, 2 of these new units have 32GB RAM and the other 3 have 16GB. This might be an upgrade path early in 2025. All 5 of the new units are running VMware vSphere ESXi.
The final note on hardware is that the two sub par units both with 16GB RAM still, and with the hypervisor hunger games hotting up in the real world, I needed or wanted a way to have access to Microsoft Hyper-V and Proxmox (we had just released support or at least announced this at VeeamON 2024)
We also do not know at this point the lay of the land for vSphere licences in 2025 and moving forward so we might have to migrate to another hypervisor or purchase lab licenses. More on this down the road. I have covered of these additional mini PCs in another blog. They do ruin the sleek look of the lab but they are functional for now.
Host Software
As mentioned we are running Talos on 5 of these nodes to form a Kubernetes cluster, I actually wrote a post about this yesterday covering the upgrade steps because I had been lazy and neglecting the upgrade process.
On the other 5 Dell nodes we are running VMware vSphere v8 Update 3, this then also has the Virtual Centre appliance deployed as a virtual machine within the cluster.
As for the Proxmox host we are running 8.2.2, I have not had much chance to play with this yet, we have the Veeam proxy deployed but I have no running systems here, my plan was to use terraform to deploy some systems here to simulate workloads such as database servers and then protect these using Veeam.
Next up we have the Microsoft Hyper-V host, we are running Windows Server 2022 and similar to Proxmox I have not chance to tinker here. I did toy with the idea of running TrueNAS as a VM here to leverage some of the faster storage on this node than the NETGEAR boxes, maybe another action item for 2025.
Finally we have the NAS devices, these if you had not guessed yet are the big black boxes above the nodes. The larger of the two is where we store our vSphere virtual machines. I also have a replica of my personal OneDrive syncing via the NETGEAR software and we have some common SMB shares here also. The smaller unit is used as a backup target for Veeam. We backup our VMs there and those SMB shares as well as OneDrive. We do then also offload important backups to object storage locations.
Wrap Up
Hopefully this might inspire someone to get into the home lab game, I had left it and was only using the cloud for a number of years, but there is something about having the tin next to you to play with.
Just writing this has given me a few action items for 2025.
- Get hands on with Proxmox and Hyper-V
- Look to upgrade Hyper-V to Server 2025
- Consider the next steps for the vSphere cluster (Hypervisor Hunger Games)
- NAS Storage options
- Upgrade Memory in 3 vSphere nodes to 32GB
I think that probably covers it for 2024 and we will see where things go for 2025.