My Homelab Setup

This is my first blog entry ever but here it goes, I’m sure if you are reading this you’ve already read lots of other homelabs configurations, they all have the same end goal, but the all vary in implementations, so here is how my homelab is setup and configured (For the moment)

Homelab diagram

Hardware:

The hardware I’m using was acquired second-hand. By today’s standards, it’s not the best and is pretty old, but that made it quite affordable. For now, it’s suiting my needs perfectly. I’d like to get more RAM for the Proxmox server and maybe a PSU for protecting the systems, but at the moment, everything is running fine.

This is the hardware I’m running:

Fujisu Esprimo D756:
- Intel Core i5-6400
- 16GB DDR4
- 128GB M.2 SSD
- 1TB SSD
Custom Build NAS:
- Intel Core i5-4590
- 20GB DDR3
- 256GB SSD
- 5x 1TB HDD

I bought a Fujitsu Esprimo D756 for 40€ and added a 1TB SSD for 50€. It has some free PCI lanes, so I might add a low-profile Intel ARC GPU for video transcoding in the future.

The NAS was a custom build using old spare parts. I got a Fujitsu D3222-B1 motherboard, CPU, and RAM for 20€, added some extra RAM, and used an SSD I had lying around. The 5x 1TB HDDs came from external drives and old PCs I had. In total, I spent about 120€ on the whole setup.

Software

The NAS is configured with its 5 drives in RAIDZ2, allowing up to 2 disk failures without data loss.

As you can see in the diagram, I’m running some basic services like VaultWarden, AdGuard Home, and a VM for my media library, along with the arr stack. I also have some LXC containers hosting coding projects I’ve made. All media is stored on the NAS and shared via NFS, with containers accessing the share as needed.

I also have three Debian VMs that I plan to use for learning Kubernetes. Right now, they aren’t hosting anything, but the goal is to set them up with k3s and build from there. I’m especially interested in managing the cluster through GitOps, as it seems like a fascinating concept, but that’s a future project.

All external traffic is routed through a Cloudflare Zero Trust Tunnel to the corresponding container or VM.

For backups, I’m using the Tuxis free tier as my Proxmox backup server, where I back up all my VMs and containers. I plan to set up a second backup server in the future, but for now, I’m happy with this setup.

Future plans

For future upgrades, I’m planning to install 2.5 Gbps network cards on my systems and upgrade the switch to support 2.5 Gbps.

I also want to expand my NAS storage by upgrading to 4TB drives, increasing total capacity from 5TB to 20TB. After setting up RAIDZ2, this should leave me with around 12TB of usable storage. As mentioned before, at some point, I’ll add 16GB more RAM to my Proxmox server and a PSU for protection.