Starting a new business(Homelab) is not an easy task. Part of the tasks that might fall into your area. The IT infrastructure for a new Business is challenging. Budgets are generally small, Skills are expensive, time is tight and requirements are ever changing.
a Lot of startups might choose to go directly to the cloud. This might be a quick and easy option as they already took care of the infrastructure. What we will do thru the next few post is build the infrastructure side. In the end I would like this to resemble the infrastructure of a cloud. User should just as easily deploy there new applications on premises as they would be able to do it in the cloud. We will Thus be Building The Home Datacenter Company to showcase this option.
Excluded from the scope would be Email. I personally prefer cloud email services and also hosting email in my Home Lab is a headache.
Outline
- Part 1 – Network setup using Ubiquity UniFi Gear.
- Part 2 – Setting Up Synology NAS for Storage and Services.
- Part 3 – Deploying Management Node(ESXi Install).
- Part 4 – Deploying Active Directory.
- Part 5 – Deploy and Setup Virtual Center Server.
- Part 6 – Create vSAN Cluster.
- Part 7 – Microsoft Certificate Services.
- Part 8 – Deploying vRealize Stack.
- Part 9 – Setup Server Provisioning.
- Part 10 – Deploying K3s Cluster for Applications
- Part 11 – Setting up Internal and External Web Endpoints.
- Part 12 – Going live Online. (Blog Proxied thru Cloudflare from OnPrem).
Hardware Requirements
I chose to use a mostly VMware toolset for the deployment as I am familiar with it. This also meant that I tried to stick as close as possible to VMware Hardware Compatibility List. For Active Directory I chose Microsoft Active Directory and to make my life a bit more Challenging I used the 2022 Insider Preview. Who does not want some additional crashes and compatibility issues.
The total lab build took around a week. Most time was spent waiting for things to happen. I also have a life and job so saying a week refers to some after hours and weekends mostly.
This was mostly a fun way of answering the “But Why?” question for any homelab.
The Home Datacenter Company has only a single mission in Life “Show the World the NGINX test Page” :-).
