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Vargo
AG's Homelab
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Introduction
After spending almost a year with the Raspberry Pi 5 ↗, I decided that I needed an upgrade. Don't get me wrong the Raspberry Pi 5 ↗ a pretty strong single board computer (SBC) that can more or less run everything you throw at it. Its power efficiency is obviously the best among SBCs. However, my end goal is to properly learn system administration, servers and networking. Hence, sticking with only the pi would not contribute to my long term learning goals. I also love tinkering with computers - especially hardware, so now is the best time to finally get a rack server for myself. Then again, as we all know, buying a brand new rack server is stupidly expensive and not practical.
After combing through the entire Internet, I finally found a reseller ↗ with good enough reviews,
who seemed trustworthy enough. After going through their website, consulting people having
professional experience with servers and the home labbing community ↗, I zeroed in on the
Dell PowerEdge R430 ↗.
The homelabbing community did warn me about it's high idle power consumption. Personal research showed idle
power consumption would be approx. 80-100w of energy (after getting the server & running it for a month and
a half now, idle power consumption is between 100-116w }})
). As my power bill is cheaper than other states, this was acceptable to me.
Weighing all information, I moved forward with the purchase.
Since I bought from server resellers, all servers in the catalouge came pre-configured.
Server Specifications
The PowerEdge R430 came with 2x Intel Xeon E5-2680 v4 which gave a
combined count of 28 cores & 56 threads. As for the RAM, it came with
64GB of DDR4 memory (which is pretty good in this economy, I'd say)
along with 8TB of SAS LFF storage. This was a steal deal considering
I got all this for ₹59,999Loading…. The
shipment }})
arrived
after 3 weeks (tortorous wait icl) and the first thing I did was run a full hardware diagnostics. At first,
I got an error from one of the RAM sticks but it was nothing reseating couldn't fix. One of the HDDs
however had 3 bad sectors which was a mild cause for concern. Currently I plan on doing nothing but in the
near future it will need replacement. One interesting thing I learnt while going through the iDRAC ↗ was
that the server was in use for only 2 years after which it was offline for nearly 1.5 years until I bought it & turned it on.
Pretty cool huh!
Monitoring
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Upgrading from the Raspberry Pi 5 to a rack server meant I could collect proper telemetry. These servers expose nearly every component's telemetry data through exporters like Node, IPMI, cAdvisor, etc. I then use Prometheus ↗ to scrape the data from these exporters and visualise them via a self-hosted instance of Grafana Dashboard ↗. Web services are monitored via UptimeKuma ↗ which pings me via ntfy ↗ whenever they go down.
Networking
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I previously had a TpLink Archer AX72 ↗ which got the job done pretty well. It had 4 ethernet ports out of which 3 were already connected. Hence it was obvious that a single port wouldn't suffice for the server which requires two ethernet connections - one for iDRAC & one for the internet. It was finally time to upgrade the networking setup. Unifi was the obvious choice since I liked their devices for a long time now. After doing some research, got the UCG-Ultra ↗ the USW Flex 2.5G 5 port PoE managed switch ↗. I know the switch will need to be upgraded in the future, but for now, this is enough. The TpLink router now runs in Access Point (AP) mode and provides wireless internet. I have plans to upgrade to a Unifi AP device soon enough.
Hosted Services
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Future Goals
- Add a 32U rack.
- Upgrade UCG-Ultra to a Dream Machine Pro
- Upgrade the 5 port switch to a Unifi Standard 24 PoE switch.
- Add a 5G internet backup system.
- Get another server, preferably another Dell rack server & connect them in a cluster.
- Add some workstation GPUs to the server.
Conclusion
I ain't gonna lie, going down this never ending rabbit hole is quite fun but reality hits when you get to know its an expensive hobby. I don't mind waiting to slowly build my "dream homelab" but the wish to get everything at once lingers at the back of my mind. Maintaining this setup is a hefty task too. You never know when some component would break. You always have to keep spares in hand & redundancy would be crucial if you don't want to lose your data. My home has a backup power system so I am not too worried about the server shutting down but what worries me is not having a backup internet to fallback to. Well, sooner than later I would find a fix for it too.
I am still learning how to properly maintain these systems and once you know what you're doing or what you're supposed to do, its quite fun really! Maybe in the future I will sell some compute too since I am not using 100% of its resources.
Well thats all for now, hope you enjoyed reading this blog. If you wanna connect with me, checkout my socials ↗. I'm mostly active on discord so you can hit me up there too.
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