Downsizing my Home Lab to a SINGLE PC

29 thoughts on “Downsizing my Home Lab to a SINGLE PC”

• Finally shutdown the last of my old home lab hardware and am now running solely on the newer, much more power efficient, systems. The new lab is a 5 node Proxmox cluster with all SSD storage (NVMe for Host installation and SATA for VM data) configured in a Ceph cluster with 10Gb networking spread across 4 ports on each node. The reason for needing 5 nodes was to ensure I had enough RAM available as each node can only accept a maximum of 64GB of RAM as where I had 192GB RAM in each HP server.

  So far the estimated amperage draw has dropped from 12A to bouncing between 4-5A. I should still be able to increase the efficiency by replacing some of the last older equipment still running.

  Kept the Same:
  x1 Dell Optiplex 7070 SFF
  x1 Dell Optiplex 7040 SFF
  x1 Cisco Catalyst 2960X (plan to replace with newer, more efficient, Ubiquiti switch)
  x1 HP ProCurve 2810-24G (plan to replace with newer, more efficient, Ubiquiti switch)
  x1 Ubiquiti US-8-60W
  x2 APC Smart-UPS 2200 (SMT2200R2X658)
  x1 RPi 3B+
  x1 ControlByWeb X410 WebRelay (RTDs for server room [house mud room] temperature monitoring)
  x1 Synology DS418

  OLD Lab:
  x3 HP Proliant DL380p Gen8 servers
  x1 Dell PowerEdge R720
  x1 NetApp DS4246 (12/24 drives loaded)
  x1 NetApp DS2246 (24/24 drives loaded)
  x1 Dell R710
  x1 Delta Networks ET-DT7024 (Flashed with Dell PowerConnect 8024F firmware)
  x1 HP ProCurve 2810-24G

  NEW Lab:
  x5 HP EliteDesk 800 G3 SFF
  x1 Ubiquiti USW-EnterpriseXG-24

• Why both kurbenetties cluster and portainer? I assume for the experience and education but is there another reason?

• Man does this make wanna reconsider my two dual socket server setup that has a lot of RAM. But good to know I can downsize to at least 8 and 6 X99 stuff that is doing nothing.

• I really liked this concept, I just built a HTPC based on the N100 that is also a NAS / Docker server for my applications, and I can even play retro games on it using RetroArch, just using Debian as a base system, no virtualization at all. And I'm very satisfied with the results so far.

• 🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation:

  00:00 🏠 Home lab downsizing: Replacing complex setup with a single PC for efficiency.
  01:32 💻 Hardware upgrades: Upgraded CPU to i7-6700, increased RAM to 64GB, and added 2x 4TB NVMe drives.
  02:39 🛠️ Customization possibilities: Explored creative use of PCI slots for various functionalities.
  03:06 ⚡ Sponsored by UGREEN: Introduced UGREEN's Nexode Pro Line chargers with gallium nitride technology.
  03:59 🚀 Essential additions: Added NVMe expansion for fast storage and 2.5GB NIC for high-speed networking.
  05:20 🎮 Gaming VM: Explored the use of RX 6400 GPU for gaming, considering its limitations and benefits.
  06:03 🌐 Firewall virtualization: Setup pfSense on a VM, showcasing network setup and performance considerations.
  09:17 🎬 Plex server optimization: Leveraged integrated GPU for hardware transcoding, enhancing Plex performance.
  11:20 🎮 Game server hosting: Used the system to host private game servers like Minecraft and CS2 using AMP.
  13:25 🌐 Virtualized Firewall: Ran pfSense as a virtualized firewall within Proxmox, highlighting network setup and performance.
  15:29 🎮 Standalone Gaming PC: Explored gaming performance, acknowledging limitations but solid performance for a standalone gaming system.
  16:54 ⚡ Power efficiency: The system pulls down only 55 Watts, showcasing efficiency with older hardware and multiple functionalities.

  Made with HARPA AI

• Docker on top of a vm is interesting to me

• I would love to see a deep dive on configuring the software. The game server and proxmoxy especially. I wonder how this would run on a pi 5 or a zimaboard. how is the nvme drive used as cache? How to configure the pci nvme to work with proxmoxy? When I ran truenas on proxmox it was a resource hog.

• I came by just to say that i will take all that stuff

• I love these little boxes. They're waaaay more than suitable as a home server and a few SBs have caught on to that idea a year ago when I was trying this out on hardware that rides the line. Turns out I don't need much and I really mean that.

  Athlon 64, 2GB DDR2, ~20TB storage, 10GbE SFP..✓💯 Works out great.

  Something like a multicore chip with onboard graphics would be like a rocket. Anything made within the past 3-6 years would definitely be put to better use as a workstation but you get the idea. There's a few lines to be drawn for this and that. It's best to define them and then build based around that.

• I started doing this in 22 and got so much push back from male colleagues using mini PCs. It's dang near impossible being ahead of the crowd as a women leader in tech. I regret nothing and love the huge drop in energy waste.

• You know, Sparkle has a new single slot A310 card that would fit. It wouldn't call it a barn burner, but it'll fit atleast.

• "I don't have a chair…"

• Any chance we might see a video on iKoolcore's R2 anytime soon? Would love to see a similar video with this!! Also, curious to why you picked proxmox over unraid. Love your content! Super helpful!!

• Is there a reason for picking the RX 6400 over the intel arc a380? They are about the same performance but the a380 is cheaper and supports av1 encode and decode.

• Kinda doing the same, about to replace my Dell R210ii server with a SFF PC to be my firewall.
  Trying to decomission my R710 that is my Hypervisor (ESXi) also running a virtual TrueNAS, and see if I can move those VM's to my R510 that is my NAS running Unraid.

  The one thing I would miss moving to a regular PC over my servers is iDRAC or ILO. I have never once hooked a keyboard/mouse/monitor to them always do everything thru remote management.

• My Homeserver is a Pentium G4560 with 28 GB RAM (With like 3 GB used) and a 500 GB SSD. It is also just Arch Linux with Docker containers. It is enough for everything I throw at it, lol.

• I would love more of a walk through/breakdown on the LCX and plex install.

• HERESY… HERESYYYYYYYYYYYYY…

  You NEED all that, DO NOT LET THE WIFE'Ss KNOW, DO NOT LET THE WIFE'S KNOW

• 7 out of 10? That's the nicest thing I've heard all day.
  Seriously though, I just spent $700 on an Epyc 7302, MB, cooler, and 128GB of RAM as an upgrade to my 7700k system that has been my server for a couple of years now. I just have to put on my big boy pants now and actually swap in the hardware.

• I use unRaid, it can handle vm's, shared storage, dockers, plugins, passthrough hardware etc. I use it on my main computer, and have a bunch of VM's for different purposes. Sure Proxmox is free, and so is freenas, but to basically have a vm ontop of a nas system feels a bit strange. So I personally prefer unRaid, it's not that expensive really, and you can upgrade your license over time.

• Hello. Can you make a video how to pass RX 6400 to windows vm, Do you attach external monitor in this VM and get output? I have i5-8400 cpu, I can not get output vm to monitor.

• If i'm spending $800 might as well spend $1200 and get a nice motherboard, cpu, video card and a $50 case to go with the rest of the hardware… knowing steam shows 3060 as most popular.. game devs will make games playable on that for while most likely .. it's $280 on newegg so what $120 more but insanely better card 176% benchmark vs the 6400.. cut back to 32gb of ram.. an i5 12600k is $230.. benchmarks 51% better.. 10 cores 16 threads.. MSI MEG Z690 UNIFY is $270 with built in dual 2.5ghz lan and quintuple m.2.. but i'm sure many other options in that price range.. might need power supply i guess another $50.. so that's $50+$120+$165+$170+$50 extra? $555.. minus $10 for m.2 card.. and $44 for the lan card.. say another $50 saved on the ram.. so that's $100 less so really it's $455 more? for a 10 core 16 thread and 3060 with new case psu mobo .. i dunno just my thoughts

• I agree with physical vs virtualized firewall conundrum; would rather have the dedicated firewall; was running Opnsense on a N100 firewall appliance; swapped over to a RK3588, running openwrt. There were some things that can be done more easily under Openwrt than in Opnsense, like Policy Based Routing. In the end, it is smaller, faster, and more power efficient with the RK3588;
  I may very well virtualize it at some point, just to try it; but in the end, I'll leave the RK3588 sitting off to the side powered off as a backup, or just run it and keep the virtualized one as backup.

• I keep hearing about Pterodactyl. I suspect it's really good, but I've been using AMP for so long now… because at one point it was the only decent option around for WebUI game server management. I also avoid docker like the plague for my use case. I do not want or need that layer of abstraction or security on my game and file server that hosts only private games and static public files.

• yeah. the reason we running multiple devices up to entire rack, because we need redundancy, scalability, and room for expand (either for production or lab). what your rack/servers missed are loud high speed server fans. LOL.

• wait, I have been tracking the ram usage and I seem to possibly be misreading this but from what I could gather:
  all under proxmox (64GB):{
  32GB of ram for the truenas instance
  4GB of ram for PFSense instance
  16GB for docker instances
  4GB for Plex instance
  8GB for game server
  24GB for x3 kubernetes clusters
  }
  now this is for an only 64GB ram system… notice why I am confused?
  either these are not on all the time, or somehow you found a glitch in reality I think with ram utilization I haven't found yet.

  Hope you have a great day & Safe travels!

• This was fun to watch thanks. It was great as a quick overall refresher on hardware and setup.

• Interesting – I have one of these on a shelf that I stopped using because of power consumption. It was streaming video non-stop 24/7 using x264 because I didn't have a half height gpu with nvenc, and pretty sure the chip mine has doesn't have quick sync. Maybe it's a generation older, but I'll have to check the socket and see if there are quicksync chips available – thanks for that! I replaced it with a MeLe celeron-based passive cooled mini pc which seems to use no power at all and streams really well off the igpu, just as an unnecessary extra note.

• How is the 8125 nic doing for you? I've got one of those cards on my home server, and an 8125 built into my laptop.

  I've tried with the driver in the kernel, and the dkms 8125 module, and I can't do any better than about 1.5-1.65 Gbps between machines, with or without the switch between them.

  Have you iperf tested yours yet?

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