What do I want to achieve? I think that is the key question from this; as I believe all other questions stem from this.
The Home lab will be stationed in the home office; as such noise, temperature and size are going to be a significant factors in my decision when building & setting this up. The next step to determine will my use for the home lab.
Requirements:
- Router running pfsense
- LAN for Main Internet Supply (1 Gbps Fiber)
- VLANs for Guest, Security, IOT (at different security levels) and Webserver
- OpenVPN Server to connect to LAN from outside
- Adblocking/DNS Blocking
- VPN setup for connecting to the internet privately and access off-region subscription services (PIA, ExpressVPN etc)
- Low Power
- Low Noise
- Switch
- At least 1 POE 1Gbps Port
- 24 1 Gbps Port
- SFP/RJ45?
- Future Expandability
- Low Power
- Low Noise
- NAS/SAN on Freenas
- 10-15TB Storage
- 64GB Ram
- Serve iSCSI Shares (for Proxmox VMs)
- Hourly/Daily/Monthly backups
- Low Power
- Low Noise
- Application Server on Proxmox (w/ storage fed by iSCSI)
10 Gbe SAN/NAS Connection
1 Gbe Main Network Connection - Plex Server
- Web Server (Apache on Ubuntu)
- MySQL Server
- Grafana Dashboard & Influx DB
- Microsoft Active Directory
- Nextcloud & MariaDB
- macOS Server
- Video Transcode Server
- Main Desktop
- Windows 10 Pro
- Multi Tasking Capable System
- Drive two 4K Displays
- 1440p 60hz Gaming Performance
- NVME Boot Drive
- Main Storage iSCSI
- 10 Gbe Connection Storage
- 1 Gbe Internet Connection
- UPS
NB: This is not an exhaustive list (yet!); as such I will try and keep it updated as I go through this process.
By enclosing all of this within a rackmount server; the idea is that all of the equipment will be secure, maintained centrally and in the event of a house move can be shifted with minimal fuss.
Furthermore, I wish to have the best value per power as electricity as a measure of consideration to environment and cost. Also, noise and heat will also have to be considered as the rack/system will be in my office.
I am hoping to source many of the required parts from the used/refurbished enterprise market to utilize enterprise features (i.e. IPMI, Power Management).