Homelab – Bill of Material

I will split the Bill of Material between what is used for my House and what is used for my Lab. These two are related but I tried keeping them separate as far as possible. I also reused as much of the Hardware I already own and for which the resale value is really low.

My Home was Already Wired with CAT6a to every room from the central patch cabinet and also Cable Internet connections in every room which can be patch from a central Patch Cabinet but only to 1 room.

Home Hardware

On The Home side I standardized on Ubiquity Hardware.

• Router/Firewall – Ubiquity Unifi Dream Router (EA)
• Core Switch – Ubiquity Unifi Switch 8P POE 60w
• Lounge – Ubiquity Unifi Switch Mini 5
• Office – Ubiquity Unifi Switch 8P
• Wifi Extension – Ubiquity Unifi AP Nano HD
• Rapberry PiCluster – Ubiquity Unifi Switch Mini 5
• Primary DNS – Raspberry Pi 3b
• Secondary DNS – Raspberry Pi 4 2GB
• Storage – Synology DS915+

Lab Hardware

For my Lab the Hardware is a bit more mix and my intension is to keep it mixed up a bit with the future 10GBe upgrade. I kept my Out of Band Networking intentionally of of Ubiquity hardware due to there frequent update cycles and lower stability in my case compared to other Brands. To buy my Homelab all new today would costs around $8000.

• Router/Firewall – Ubiquity Unifi Dream Machine
• Primary Switch – Ubiquity Unifi Switch 8P
• Secondary Switch – Ubiquity Unifi Switch 8P
• Out of Band Switch – Cisco SG300-10
• Storage – Synology DS415+ with
  • 4 x Western Digital Red 4TB HDD
• Management Cluster:
  • 1 x SuperMicro E300-8D with
    • 2 x 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX
    • 1 x Western Digital SN550 1TB NVMe SSD
• Workload Cluster:
  • 3 x SuperMicro E301-9D-8CN4 each with
    • 4 x 32GB Corsair Vengeance LPX
    • 1 x Western Digital Red SN700 500GB NVMe SSD
    • 2 x Samsung 870 QVO 2TB SATA III SSD

Shortcomings

I currently do not have any Power Redundancy or backup power. I general the power here is extremely stable except when I short it out with the Toaster, or switch off the wrong smart plug. Part of the redesign was due the the constant need to rebuild my vCenter or appliances due to storage corruption.

The SuperMicro E301-9D is not on the VMware HCL. This was done due to the higher core count available on the EPYC CPU’s over the E300-8D’s Intel CPU’s. The components that usually cause issues like Network and Storage are Server class and not consumer so my hope would be for some longer support life on them.

Another thing to think about is that the SuperMicro server does come with expansion options but the mounting brackets are not included in the initial purchase.

In the next part I will go thru my Physical and Logical Designs.