Image credit https://www.reddit.com/r/HackRack/
update:: 14-Jan-2023
Hi, here I going to describe my humble home lab, the hardware I have and some of the software I installed. This is not a howto post.
Networking
I run a pretty basic networking, just 1 firewall.
- Mikrotik hEX RB750Gr3; This is my network gateway. Here I have all my firewall rules.
- TP-Link EAP225 V3; 3 AP managed via omada controller.
Compute
The compute power are covered by the following equipment:
- PowerEdge R630
- 2x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2690 v3 @ 2.60GHz
- 32 GiB Ram
- 2x 1TB SSD-Disk
- 2x 2TB HDD-Disk
Storage
For my storage service, I use a VM with truenas and pass through the disks to the VM.
Application park
I will just describe the principal applications and their use, this is because a lot of them are for testing purposes and not for my production environment.
Media Home Services
I have a Plex media services ecosystem docker base, all running on a docker VM on my PowerEdge R630. If you want to know more, visit the following repo on GitHub for more details.
Monitoring App
To monitor my entire network, I use uptime-Kuma.
Hypervisor
For my hypervisor, I use VMware ESXi on the Optiplex 7040. At the moment of this post, I’m using the VMware vCenter Server 7.0.0. I virtualize some Linux ubuntu server for an RKE cluster.
Storage software
For the storage software i use Unraid. Pretty solid and pretty easy.
Kubernetes Implementation
I chose RKE for my Kubernetes implementation. Here some detail of the environment:
- I have 2 virtual nodes for worker and 1 physical with the controlplane and etcd.
- Longhorn for the storage system
- MetalLB for load-balancer.
Advertisements control
In my PI4 I have pi-hole in a docker container. with this, I literally have no ads on my network.
Docker engine manager
With all those docker-engine all around, I need something to manage them centralize. For this, I have “Portainer“. With portainer, I can manage all my docker engines from a beautiful web-based console. I still prefer the CLI but it’s nice to have the option to manage them from anywhere through the web.
This is more or less my current network. My plans are to move all those containers to k8s manifest in my RKE cluster. So, stay tuned.
Here some pics.
All knowledge is connected to all other knowledge. The fun is in making the connections
Arthur C. Aufderheide
👋
