I dabbled in the VPS world before getting a bit disillusioned with how much I needed to spend, in order to get a modicum of performance out of these machines. I initially signed up with a VPS I found on LowEndBox (shoutout to the awesome deals one may find there), but three months hence, I got annoyed by niggling throughput issues, and the upcharge to move to a SSD RAID plan. In the meantime I started to frequent /r/homelab and one thing led to another, and for the last 7 months I have been teaching myself how to host at home.
Specs
So, without further ado, here’s my humble initial setup, while I learn the ropes.
- Dell Optiplex 9020 with Core i7 4th Gen 3.6GHz
- 32GB of non-ECC RAM
- 2x256GB ADATA SSD in RAID 1
- 8TB Seagate Data Store
- Intel PRO/1000 VT Quad Port Server Adapter LP PCI-E EXPI9404VT
Admittedly, it’s non-server class hardware, but for my homelab needs it will suffice.
Virtual Machines
On it, I am running VMWare ESXi 6.5, the free version, on which I currently I have five virtual machines chugging away – all serving their good purpose.
- pfSense 2.3.4-RELEASE (amd64)
- Web Server – which is hosting this site, as well as sodhis.org, sodhis.net and edvpro.com along with the bevy of subdomains with specialized applications.
- Git server – running Gitlab Community Edition 9.4
- Oracle XE Server – running the XE (free) Oracle instance
- SOLR server – more on this in another post.
To be succinct, pfSense acts as a Router for my home, while separating my Homelab in another VLAN. Also separated into their own VLAN are all the IOT devices around the house – Thermostats, Printers, Refrigerators, etc. And yet another VLAN hosts any guests on a separate WiFi network.
Over the next few months I will detail how I implemented this infrastructure, if not for anyone else, but for me to document it somewhere.