Hello and welcome to the first ever overview of my homelab on this site. I will probably create a post each time, something significant gets added to my homelab.

Hardware

My homelab consist of hardware I bought off of ebay-kleinanzeigen and ricardo.

The following hardware is in use:

  • Synology DS213j (videostation and backups from local clients)
  • 24 Port Patch Panel
  • 24 Port Patch Panel
  • Cisco 4948-48 (coreswitch, obviously frontmount masterrace ;))
  • 1u KMM Unit (Cables are missing at the moment)
  • HP DL120 G7 (pfsense)
  • DELL R620 (hypervisor XenServer, will be replaced in the future by the new R720)
  • HP DL180 G6 (freenas)
  • DELL R720 (hypervisor ESXi)
  • APC 600VA (delivers power for the pfsense box and coreswitch)
  • HP 1500 G2 UPS (delivers power for the hypervisor and freenas server)

The setup pulls approximately 300-400 Watts. My goal is to not go over 500 Watts.

Operating Systems

CentOS:

This year I started moving from Ubuntu Server to CentOS. This had mainly one reason. It’s similar to RHEL, which many businesses use today. So does my employer.

Windows Server:

Well since I had my apprenticeship exam about SCCM, I used my dreamspark licenses (WIN2012R2) to create my own SCCM environment. This environment helped me understand SCCM and create an environment from 0 to fully working.

Services and VMs

I have some VMs that I consider PROD, since they are needed in my network. Otherwise my family won’t be happy.

Services Running – PROD:

  • Active Directory: At the moment I only have two computers connected to the active directory. One is my Workstation and the other is a testing VPC with windows 10. In the future I will connect the other workstations at home to it. This will make it easier to connect shared drives, printer and set other GPOs.
  • Blog www.exera.ch: This whole blog is running on a VPS from Digital Ocean, since my internet connection is not great with its 20 down 2 up.
  • Teamspeak Server: Since I like to play games with friends I created my own Teamspeak server. We need it often, so I consider it a PROD System.

 

Services Running – TEST:

  • Virtual PC (Win10)
  • Minecraft Server
  • SCCM Server with clients
  • SQL Server

 

Future homelab goals

  1. Automation: I’d really like to automate setup of my VMs. Until now I only tried it with Spacewalk. It was a pain in the ass and I did not  get it working. I’m still searching for a good guide or an alternative. If I get the whole thing working I will create a guide on here.
  1. Monitoring: Who doesn’t like piecharts or heatmaps. I probably will implement grafana, somehow.
  1. Paperless Bureau: Another goal I have, is to make my place paperless, means scanning documents with OCR and bin the originals. This should improve my mess at home 😛
  1. Try some Cloud: I read about openstack and would like to learn how I can implement it.
  1. Advanced PFsense: As you probably know, pfsense can do pretty much anything. I’d like to start a proxy as well as ad blocking and an IDS system.