My current lab [Updated June 4th 2020)

Hi all!

This post will be about the current state (05/20/2020 06/04/2020) of my home lab. Please keep in mind that I also have two ESXi hosts that I rent from a datacenter in Germany that I partially use for my home lab (though they are nowhere near as powerful as my home server).

Here are some pictures:

The black device on the wall is my ISP’s modem. It’s set to bridge mode, meaning it does not do any NAT, DHCP, etc. That routes to my EdgeRouter (which you can see on the edge of the plank in the first picture). This is the main router. It runs DHCP, does NAT, runs a BGP daemon and I have a VLAN on there for NSX-T.

The host you see here, is my HP Proliant DL380G6. It has two Intel Xeon X5660s (6 cores/12 threads at 2.8 GHz), and 288 GB of DDR3 ECC memory at 1333 MHz. I have six drives in it as you can see, they are connected with two SAS cables to an extra RAID card I have in the server, a Smart Array P420. I have two 2TB HDDs in it, a 320GB HDD, two 500GB SSDs and (now, with the update) two 1TB SSDs. Sadly on June 2nd 2020 my P420 controller died, more info here, so right now I use the build-in Smart Array P410i. The colorful cables all go up through the ceiling, into my bedroom’s floor, to a network switch as you can see down here:

Here you can see my Raspberry Pi collection,stacked on my Humax decoder. The black switch at the bottom is my 24 port non-PoE EdgeSwitch 24 Lite. It’s currently full. Stacked on top I have my older TP-Link TL-SG2216. Currently it’s not in use… yet.
Laying on that switch in a UniFi UAP-AC-PRO (more on that later). On the blue box I have a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 4GB. I use this as a test machine sometimes. On the upper plank I have a Unifi Security Gateway for the WiFi and Guest network.
Next to that is a Unifi 8 port 60W PoE switch. Connected to that is the UAP-AC-PRO you see in the picture, and there’s one downstairs as well. Next to that is a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B I believe, connected to a ADS-B receiver dongle with matching antenna next to the RPi.
There used to a second RPi to the right of it, but it’s on my project table at the moment. That used to be connected with a SDR dongle, and has its antenna on the plank below, on the right side against the wall. That’s my indoor antenna I use to listen in on the airbands (which in The Netherlands is legal at the time of writing).

That’s the current state of my homelab right now. Hopefully it gives you an idea on what I run right now. It’s not done yet… I possibly need to update in a few years as officially, my CPUs don’t support ESXi 7.

I also want to go10 gigabit at some point, but that’s all years away most likely.

Thank you for reading and have a great day!