My homelab
I have always been super nerdy about technology, and I didn't want to spend a good chuck of money on hosting providers to play around with different systems and solutions so I set out to build my own little data center at home.
As projects began to grow in size and complexity, the need for a more “enterprise” solution became increasingly apparent. This realization sparked the beginning of an ambitious plan to build a mini data center in my garage.
The first steps involved logistical preparations. I hired an electrician to install the necessary power infrastructure, and I began the task of dividing the garage into two sections. One part would house the "data center," while the other would accommodate my car and other miscellaneous items.
Once the data room construction was complete, it was time to equip it. I ordered a server rack, servers, various IT equipment, and a ventilation system. The result was a 42U rack filled with servers, two tower servers, a Network Video Recorder (NVR), and switches.
The room is cooled using two 12″ intake filtered ventilation fans and a 20″ exhaust fan, maintaining positive pressure to keep dust and dirt out.
Inside this data room, I run two virtualization nodes, allowing me to create virtual servers for any need I might have. There’s also two 100TB file servers and a standalone docker node for various containers. Additionally, I have a dedicated streaming server that streams GPU-accelerated video 24/7 and a transcoding server for on-the-fly hardware transcoding of video files.
Here are some of the services/solutions I run:
- Web server
- 2 Domain Controllers
- WSUS server
- MDT / WDS Server
- Rundeck
- Uptime Kuma
- Plausible
- phpIPAM
- KMS Server
- Mail server
- Database server
- Plex
- Emby
- xTeVe
- 2 Adguard DNS (master & slave)
- Reverse Proxy Server
- Storj Node
- Gitea
- Grafana
- NextCloud
- OnlyOffice
- Home Assistant
- Prometheus
- Searxng
- VaultWarden
- RainLoop
- Pritunl
- Planka
- Overseerr
- Sonarr
- Radarr
- Bazarr
- SiteInspector
- Ansible
- Proxmox Backup Server
- TrueNAS File Server
- Netbox
- Komodo
- WireGuard
- Pangolin
- Windows CA Server
- DevBox (For software development)
- Hyper-V lab (Nested virtualization)
Building this mini "data center" has been a journey of scaling and adaptation. It’s a testament to the power of innovation and the possibilities of home-based enterprise solutions. As the projects continue to grow, this "data center" altho in a very small scale, heh, will serve as a robust and reliable foundation for my IT journey in the years to come.
