How to start your HomeLab journey?

31 thoughts on “How to start your HomeLab journey?”

• Advance your career as a DevOps Engineer with Simplilearn’s DevOps Engineer Master’s Program: https://www.simplilearn.com/devops-engineer-masters-program-certification-training?utm_source=youtube&utm_medium=influencer&utm_campaign=influencer-Americas-Tech-DevopsEngineer-christian

• Hey Christian, could you make a video on connecting a smb share to a docker container. I tried and had a lot of reliability and permission related problems

• I wanted to ask, how does one start out doing homelab/code correctly with git etc? Although I have many years of old-school infra experience I’m getting back into homelab & containers etc, learning git on the way but I’d LIVE to know how to build out a homelab using devops methodology asap in the journey, so I’m guessing building a “build server” with docker & git server tools etc then write the code to build out the rest of the infrastructure from there. I guess I’m saying I’d love to automate from as early in the process as possible but I currently need to manually build my systems to learn the basics. FWIW I’m playing with a bunch of Rpi 5’s with nvme storage but also have a HO T630 I want to play with promox on. I also have a gaggle of synology boxes 🤣 Love your channel, I’m currently soaking it up!

• I started going all enterprise grade then realised the 42u server rack I needed. Just dominated the office I work in. There was also the noise, cooling and power required to drive these. I’ve now started the process of going all desktop of small form factor. I have a 12th gen Nuc running a lot of the heavier elements at present and an AMD variant doing the rest. My final device in the cluster is my Nas which is an old hp desktop. It needs a refresh later this year and will be looking at the new minis forum offerings as well as building my own for some more power hungry scenarios where I may want gpu passthrough. All the advice you give Christian is on point 👍

• Thanks for this. I really think this approach will create subscribers. Simple tutorials with all affordable hardware. I'm starting from what feels like zero…less than zero maybe. There aren't many channels in this space that make stupid question/everyone knows that so why make a video topics but I'd probably benefit. The kind of stuff you can't believe someone doesn't know would probably do well. Thanks for the content and great job.

• For starters and even experts in Kubernetes, I highly advise using a manager like Portainer or Rancher. It makes life so much easier to have visual representations and a simple GUI to interact with. I learned command line first and bashed my head on the keyboard for weeks. I still recommend learning it, but I still wish I had known about these tools before my deep dive.

• I disagree

• I want to build a media server, what you suggest?
  Can I use proxmox?
  I'm thinking in something like Jellyfin and arr stack, can you give me some suggestions please?

• Hi. I have to say that I learned something from you. In my homelab, I don't care about networking. I have somewhat old USFF PC with i5-6500 running Linux and few docker … i mean podman images (cloudflared, cloudflare-ddns, few instances of nginx, gitea, nextcloud and syncthing) and it's enough for me. Distributions … I guess Fedora, OpenSuse, CentOS, Debian are valid options, since all services are in container anyways.
  Problem of these kind of videos on youtube is that many youtubers need something to reliably store and process and archive tens of terrabytes of 4k video and here, switch Linux distros more often than underwear.
  I would discourage people from ZimaBoard or high end Raspberries – they are not upgradable or scalable. They are sufficient for some task, but not for everything and they are not the best starting point. I made that mistake. i5-6500T is about five times faster than zimaboard. it consumes below 6W totally idle, 8W is more realistic. Zimaboard consumes 2W. Difference is either 3 times or 5-6W. Does it pay off to have five times slower PC, with 2GB RAM instead of 8GB? No, if you value your time. Not to mention stuff like when you need Linux desktop and browser. Or use it for VSCode server.
  And about servers – my brief past experience with them is mixed. They are not more reliable or powerful than desktop PC (except of having 16 15kRPM SAS hot-swappable harddrives). Advantage is better service contract and redundant components so if they fail, not much happens.

• I use refurbished Lenovo M720q and HP Deskmini 600 with Proxmox for compute and Unraid for storage and it is amazing, what these little units are able to offer while using just round about 6-10 Watt 😀👍.

• I'm just starting my homelab journey… or do I? Funnily enough, I actually had my own home lab when I was 15 or 16 years old (which was actually 16 years ago!). Old Pentium 3 700MHz PC with 256MB RAM. I've had there my own website hosting, 2x OpenArena servers – full ALL THE TIME!!! for some weird reason – becasue it was all running on ADSL internet with 1Mbit/128kbit speeds (yep!).

  And now I'm discovering people do that stuff nowadays and even do multiple YouTube channels with all of that! Amazing!

  And I always to do something bigger, so… here I am, waiting for 4x Minisofum MS-01 to be shipped and 2G down/600M up internet. We'll see how that goes… 😀

  And now I'm working as DevOps, previously as Linux SysAdmin since (total 12 years) so I have a lot of knowledge to spare and to share. Planning to do a little overkill and not go with just Proxmox – it's too easy… I wanna do OpenStack since I really liked in in previous company. And yeah, it's totally overkill and totally complicated to manage.

• Any thoughts about different brands of racks? Most homelab YouTubers seem to use the Startech rack.

  Watch out for some cheaper managed 8 port switches that only allow you to use vlan 1-8; they can be at least confusing when your internet provider delivers internet on vlan 6 on the wan side.

• You should do a new version of proxmox automation!! please

• Laptop, proxmox, and have fun!

• I just wanted to upgrade my 4-bay Synology NAS to 16 drives and was surprised by how expensive it was and how shit the HW was. I knew it was going to be a huge investment of time, but it was January and I couldn’t ride my motorcycle so I deduced to do it. So I bought a 36-bay storage server, a 10GbE switch, and a 25U rack which I thought would be more than enough. Then I looked at pricing to back up 50TB and decided it would be better to buy the same server and storage. Then I wanted to play around and didn’t want to mess with Plex and all the arrs I was running for the family, so I decided to buy a NUC for homelabbing. I ran out of RAM quickly, so I bought a 2U server and another switch because I ran out of ports. Now, 5 months later, I completely filled the rack and spend all my time working on little projects. It got out of hand quickly. I hate to think how many thousands of dollars I spent too.

• Klasse Video! Hast du dir mal das Ansible MASH-Playbook angesehen? Das ist meine neue Lieblingsart Server zu konfigurieren, da ich eine zentrale Stelle habe, wo die gesamte Konfiguration lebt.

• One of the best testing investments I made was a used Lenovo Mini from eBay.
  Only £75 and currently running in combination with our old NAS to provide all our media sharing, home tools and home automation. All within Proxmox.
  Plus plenty of headroom to test and play with new tools in containers.
  And only 15W at the wall. I love that wee thing

• Rocky Linux would be a cool playground for starters as well

• Do you have a video to create a docker server? I would like to do this and get away from using my synology NAS.

• i find it really hard to replace proxmox with another
  nice video

• I had old hardware which currently turned to small server

• I feel like Mini PCs can go in the medium category, depending on specs. There is a very wide range of performance.

• I use clean kvm from years and I do not understand why you do not like it. If you mean web GUI there are some options. I haben much more possibilities in networking than proxmox or any other option can provide. To use private network on the host on proxmox I need to use vlans or ovn but in plain libvirt based kvm I just make nat local network and it just works. It lacks stuff in multi node but I do not care – I want to have cicd it all so live migrate via pipeline any way. If I will ever want ha – i can use opensvc or pacemaker (just like proxmox uses). It is harder not for newbie but if you love tinkering and learning it will give you bigger understanding of your system

• Just to add OMV(Open MediaVault) to the OS list, it works very well on a raspberry pi, I have a AMD 5600g and it works great. Plus you can use different sized hdd in JBOD setup.
  Also with its plugins you can run vms, lxc and it has a great docker compose plugin that makes portainer redundant.
  It's also very light weight and based on Debian

• Sir just because of your content, I have achieved L2 Cloud System Administrator position in Canada's 2nd largest software company ❤

• Thanks Christian!!!

• loved my micro PCs but for a while now, I have been running the main part of my lab on 3 x HP Elite Desk SFF PCs. They draw a little more power but the added PCI slots were worth it, as I wanted to add dual SFP+ and Dual 2.5GbE NICs to them.

  Picked them all up on ebay for about 150 each & they all had intel 6C / 12T processors (intel i7-8700). Spent a little bit more to get them all to 64GB of RAM and give them each 2 extra NVME drives to contribute to the storage pool. Now I have more than enough to play around with and learn / do nearly anything I could imagine in the homelab.

  I can't recommend enough the Elitedesk w/ the i7-8700. It's the perfect middle ground between micro PCs and a full form-factor server.

• My Homeserver is running on my old Gaming Notebook with an I7 5700HQ. But now i plan to reorg this. I'm searching for a good, cheap and performant replacement. Anyone suggestions?

• Finally, as I have planned to build my first homelab, I've already got 3 mini PCs

• Old Ryzen 5700G / AM4 Desktop hardware is still my (personal) sweetspot. You can have 128GB ram. As the GPU has a GPU, you geht your GPU slot free for more m.2 storage. My Servers have 4x m.2 – up to 6 SATAs. What AM4 usually doesn't have 10Gbit NICs on the boards and the RAM you buy is DDR 4 non ECC – but it's cheaper and less powerhungry then any of the ancient servers you can get.

• Amazing vid ! keep up the good work Christian

Comments are closed.