The old homelab continues to evolve and the current version has changed enough from the last time I posted about it to cover the what and why of it.
Dream Machine Pro Max acting as the main router. This replaces the Asus routers that I’d been using before and is a significant step up in capabilities. The option to expand out the features, using the UniFi ecosystem, so that it can be a PVR and management pane for home security and access is of interest. As well as its ability to mange the UniFi range of WiFi equipment. At the moment I’m enjoying the much more mature views and insights it offers into my network traffic and the more in depth management of it. It’s a powerful beast with 10G throughput for routing and firewall capabilities. As well as featuring IDS/IPS, but there is a throughput penalty if those are active.
Mikrotik CRS309-1G-8S+ this is the main switch for the lab for fiber and DAC connections. Together with a NETGEAR XS508M for 10G over Ethernet, and a combination of them both allows all my lab equipment to connect at a minimum of 10G speeds. They are connected to each other via a 10G fiber link.
2x Whitebox home built servers. Powered by an AMD 5900X cpu, 128GB of ram, on an AsRock Rack X470D4U Motherboard. This is currently running on WMWare EXSI 7, but will most likely be moved over to Proxmox. Due to the death of VMug (VMware user group) post Broadcom takeover, killing off discounted access to licenses for professionals to use in their lab work.
Synology 1821+ NAS This provides the core storage for the Vmware lab. The VM’s are hosted on NFS datastores. This NAS is backed up using snapshot replication to my older 1819+, as well as making use of snapshots to protect the active file system from ransomware and accidental deletion of data. It also hosts various Docker containers on its Container Manager service, as well as hosting the DNS zones for the lab.
I’m less impressed with this NAS over time as Synology keep removing or hiding features that professionals in the industry use as well as home users.
Such as hiding SMART metrics for the drives, overly promoting, or mandating the use of, their own rebranded drives. Cheeping out by removing CODEC support for HEIC/H.265 which were supported when the units shipped. Which impacted paying customers for their add on Security product, as well as home users using the devices for their advertised purpose as a media server, etc.
While there are workarounds to address these issues it’s increasingly indicative of a mindset change in the company. When it reaches end of life I may look elsewhere or roll my own.
Infonomicon 