My small and energy efficient homelab

Homelab
1

Hi there.
I’ve been following your videos for quite some time, and finally found this forum where I’ll share a little bit of info about my setup.

Here is my very small homelab rack:

Homelab
Homelab2000×1500 710 KB

This rack consist of the following hardware:

  • Power switch
  • UniFi Security Gateway Pro (USG-PRO-4)
  • UniFi Switch 16 PoE (USW-16-POE)
  • SuperMicro Rack server (A2SDi-4C-HLN4F motherboard in CSE-505-203B cabinet)
  • 1 Raspberry Pi 4 on top

The server has Quad-core Intel Atom 2.2 GHz, 32 GB of Ram, 4x Gigabit LAN + BMC/IPMI port, 500GB NVMe system disk and 4x 2 TB SSD Raid-Z.

Now the really amazing thing about this setup is that the entire rack uses …
54 Watts when running - that’s Firewall, Main switch and 2 Servers ! (the Pi uses 3,5 Watts)

This is about 1,3 kWh per day.

The servers are running a variety of things (most of them in Docker):

  • UniFi controller (my own local and my family remote control)
  • Unbound DNS (primary and secondary on the Pi)
  • Samba shares
  • Bookstack
  • Nextcloud
  • Transmission
  • Various utilities (Webmin, Portainer, Proxy Manager, Iperf3 etc.)

At some point, I’m thinking about also running Mailserver, Home Assistant and other things.

I’m so happy with this small setup, and the very low energy usage. :wink: :+1:

3 Likes
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Beautiful! Great job on setting up your home lab. Brilliantly executed :slight_smile:

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Just updated some small things and cable management.

Replaced the fans in my firewall from AVC (=crap) to Noctua, so now it’s also silent.

And installed my patch panel, with HDMI, USB and Ethernet outputs for 2 Raspberry Pi at the left.

IMG_20210429_111911
IMG_20210429_1119114000×3000 3.28 MB

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IMG_20210429_1235274000×3000 2.58 MB

Now it looks even better! :grin:

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4

Oh you brought the HDMI and USB (3?) ports up to your patch panel too? Nice! :thumbsup:

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5

Yeah that’s the advantage of keystone patch panels - so now it’s also a custom front for Raspberry Pies hidden behind, so that I can hook up display, keyboard and USB storage if I need to.

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6

This is brilliant! I love the idea of hiding a couple pi’s behind a keystone patch panel. Thank for your sharing, it inspires and encourages the rest of us.

Even if my homelab is a recycled desktop and Raspberry Pi’s on an old banquet table tethered to power strips and an old switch :slight_smile: . My homelab isn’t pretty, but it is just about silent with just one Dell Optiplex case fan spinning in the old desktop/server.

2 Likes
7

This is absolute GOLD. I love it so much. Great job!

1 Like