90 lines
4.8 KiB
Markdown
90 lines
4.8 KiB
Markdown
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---
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date: 2023-11-29
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title: Planning a Homelab Upgrade
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tags:
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- homelab
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- hardware
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- networking
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- unraid
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- proxmox
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- pfsense
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---
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I am just starting to plan a major overhaul of my homelab and decided where better to start than by documenting the process.
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This is about how my setup has reached its current state and why this setup is starting to feel limiting.
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## A Brief History
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The first home server I used was a Sunfire X4150 that I got for something like $50. Windows Home Server 2011 seemed
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like a logical choice of OS (this is where I started; I didn't know what I was doing) so I grabbed a copy from my local Fry's (RIP).
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After some adventures in data recovery from a dead drive (read: data loss), I built an [unRaid](https://unraid.net/) box.
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One of the main motivations here was that I could add drives over time and increase capacity easily without having to match
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drive models or even sizes; this meant I could use all the random drives I had lying around and save some money.
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My current server is basically unchanged since then, with a few upgrades, namely a 3900X and some 8TB HDDs shucked out of
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WD external drives when they went on sale.
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## Taking Inventory
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The bulk of my setup lives in a 15U rack that I built into the wall of my office. I also have some other networking equipment,
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a tower for work, and a personal machine I built into my desk but those aren't relevant to this project.
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I'll work through my current setup from the top of the rack down.
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### Networking
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- (2U) 48 port patch panel: This is where networking infrastructure like switches and access points, IP cameras, and other
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rack equipment terminates
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- (1U) 48 port Ubiquiti POE switch: This handles switching for most of the devices terminating at the patch panel
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- (1U) 8 port Ubiquiti 10GbE switch: This connects other switches and provides a 10gig connection to my Unraid server
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- (2U) pfSense router: This is just an old PC in a 2U case with an Intel Gigabit NIC
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### Compute
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- (3U) Unraid server: This is where all of my storage and compute is
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- (1U) X4150 server: I spin this up manually every month or so to manually back up data from my Unraid server. Its loud and power
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hungry so I leave it shutdown as much as possible
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### Power
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- (2U) TrippLite UPS: This provides enough power to run things for about 15 minutes, long enough to safely shutdown and even keep
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networking up through a brief outage
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For anyone keeping score at home, that leaves 3U empty which does factor into my plan.
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## Current Shortcomings
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Now that I've laid out what I have and how I got there, let's look at some pain points.
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### Power Consumption
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Much of my setup has been built from surplus or repurposed systems. The pfSense router in particular is overbuilt for the minimal
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compute that routing requires. The backup X4150 server is mostly powered off, but when running for a backup it takes a lot of power
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and turns it into a lot of heat and noise in my office.
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### Availability and Maintenance
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I have a pfSense VM defined on my Unraid server, so I can at least take the pfSense router down for maintenance without network
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downtime but the same cannot be said about the Unraid server. If the Unraid server is down, Plex, HomeAssistant, NextCloud, this blog,
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and a lot of other things go down. I also have some issues with my pfSense box resuming after a power outage with is particularly
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annoying if I'm not home to turn it back on.
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### Compute
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My 12-Core 3900X is generally more than enough compute for me now, but it is occasionally limiting and will not support all of the
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services I want to deploy. I also need more than 32GB of RAM, but that's an easy upgrade.
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## The Plan
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There are two main upgrades I want to make to address the current shortcomings.
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### pfSense Router Appliance
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This one's easy, I just want to get a low-power box to run pfSense since it needs to run 24/7;
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I'll likely pick up a used network appliance on eBay for this.
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### Clustered Compute
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This still requires a bit more research. I've been becoming more acquanted with Kubernetes as
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[part of my day job](https://github.com/NeonGeckoCom/neon-diana-utils) and am settled on setting up a cluster at home.
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I will likely use [Proxmox](https://www.proxmox.com/en/) since it checks the boxes for being open source, having a web UI
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for management, and being popular enough to find support online.
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I'll use my current pfSense router and Unraid server as nodes, possibly adding another new node with a GPU to play with some LLMs.
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### Storage
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I am as of yet undecided on what to do here; I need to do some more reading up on GlusterFS, Ceph, iSCSI,
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and probably some technologies I know even less about.
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## What Comes Next
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This post is already getting a lot longer than I anticipated, so I'll wrap it up here. My next steps are to (1) find an appropriate
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upgrade for my pfSense router and (2) decide on a storage solution.
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