Homelab

( project overview )

This homelab is designed for 24/7 residential operation, balancing high-performance virtualization with acoustic and energy constraints.

Centered around a three-node Proxmox cluster, the system runs services including Home Assistant, NAS, and local AI/LLM solutions.

The architecture features enterprise-level network security with extensive VLAN segmentation managed by a dedicated firewall PC, ensuring service isolation.

Utilizing cost-effective hardware repurposed for server use, the project demonstrates system integration, custom rack design, and sound dampening solutions without relying too much on traditional enterprise server equipment.

At a glance

At a single glance main entities here are the rack, desk and drawers. Feel free to jump to the "Cluster" part of the page, if you find yourself uninterested of the surroundings of those.

Let's start from the simplest - the drawers, which are just bunch of IKEA ALEX-series ones, one wider houses spare fans, printing supplies, more delicate non-used hardware that needs its own space, etc. There is also regular network connected Ecotank printer on top of that - as I am in some aspects old school.

Couple of narrower drawers are put together for smaller and more technical stuff; such as small adapters, memory sticks, soldering supplies, Velcros, cotton swabs, multi-meters, batteries, screws, tapes and decommissioned hardware ready to be recycled.

On top of those there is semi-closed with open front but sound dampened sides for 3D printer.

Mentionable here is that spare cables (among some other things, but cables being a major one) does not fit to those drawers so they are located on next room outside of a regular 'homelab' perimeter. Still within 6 to 10 running meters, so not really out of reach.

Wall-mounted

Next to the double drawers there is wall mounted DIY'ed work-desk, with built in dual monitor mount, mounting rails for support, and work-area with Velcro-mounted extension cord and conduit mounted under for cabling needs. At desk-area there is dock for laptop, as that is most of the times only hands-on PC that I use.

Whole desk-complex is electrically adjustable from desk heights from 60cm up to almost 140cm (range might have been a little overkill there, but, meh, does not cost anything - well other than that I can't have candles on the upper shelve, as if the desk is set to upmost position there is just 26cm clearance between upper shelf and ceiling. In normal use clearance is however always at least 60cm, so not that big of an deal.).

Wall mounting is implemented by couple of thru-wall -bolts and supported by two linear rails reducing any excess wiggle. There was some heavy decisions involved to make sure that the whole thing would not weight too much as the height adjustment part is still taken care of with single actuator - with its own weight limits.

So far the whole thing works just fine, but might need a second look after couple years of heavy use.

Cabinet

Then there is the rack cabinet, which is StarTech 25U open frame -one, with DIY'ed side panels. Side panels are made from excess laminate, covered with felt on outside and some kind of automotive-grade sound dampening panels on inside. Panels are mounted - or rather hanged - to the sides of cabinet with rubber mounts to reduce any extra noise from that.

Back-panel is made from couple of (IKEA) closet shelves with same sound dampening on inside. Mounting there is however different and the upper side is fixed to the cabinet with some bolts and spacers, providing air-gaps for air circulation on the sides of the back-panel. Lower half of the back-panel is also fixed, but instead of straight to the rack closet it is hinge mounted to the upper panel, so it can be opened fully open position in 180 degrees.

Oh, and one of the side panels (at desk side) has simple guitar wall-mount with electric guitar hanged on, which is kind of visible being this mix of natural wood / deep-blue element on otherwise black and metallic area of living room. However, I do not play nor know how to play that, but it is nice to tinker with, and I must say that even as for someone who does not know a jack-shit of how to play an guitar it still does sound incredibly good after it has been tuned with an oscillometer. No matter how you play it.

Out-of-sight

And as for all of the printing equipment would not be completed without there being a hidden one, there is.

Buried out of sight, deep inside the dark corners of the rack-cabinet, behind all of the short (or half-) depth switches and shelves. My old-reliable, 3D printer, Ender 3 Pro, which is perfect place for it as it is fairly quiet (with silent motherboard - and that being only modification for it - well only-one beside some bed-leveling spacers), but not that quiet that it could be used at night without the sound-dampening that the rack-closet around it provides.

So that is just perfect as I can use the excess space behind the short hardware and use that old slow 3D printer overnight for some bigger prints without it causing any sleep-issues, which I can not say about the other 3D printer that I have, but that one is faster, so it is not as big of an problem with it.

Fully-sauced survivor

As daily driver I lug around an old fully sauced corporate survivor bought second hand - an HP EliteBook x360 1040 G7, which I stumbled on when trying to find cheap used laptop for my little sister for her studies.

Well, CPU's and RAM / SSD on that are not the top spec, but it has other cool features, like very well thought out keyboard layout, touch-screen, built-in privacy shield, fingerprint reader, IR-capable camera, camera / mic -disconnect buttons & BIOS settings, adjustable keyboard backlight, 4G modem, - so, as I said - fully sauced.

The i5-10310U CPU and especially it's iGPU is the most limiting factor for my use-cases, but then again, if anything needs that much of computing power I can just launch an virtual workstation on Proxmox cluster and do the thing at there.. and yeah, the Linux / Fedora support for the hardware could be better, as it is what I use on that machine, but that is kind of what is to be expected with anything that have any other than just standard widely used components in it.

Cluster

Now we have pretty much the general picture of the elements that is in play around of this - unless you skipped those, ehm.. lets focus on the actual rack hardware, as that is where the magic happens.

Proxmox cluster is major player there. The cluster itself consist of three nodes, first one is Chinese mini PC 'Aurora', then there is self-built 3U-unit 'Aeon' (with rails) and last - also self built - on 4U rack-case 'Apex' (also with rails).


Aurora - really power efficient mini-PC that is being powered via 30W USB-C brick. This feels like it punches way above its weight here. Takes up at least 128 times less space than other two on, still running same amount of services than the other two combined. There is of course an big difference of which kind of services, but let's not focus on that just now.

This is kind of set and forget node, boring and seemingly reliable, which could have not being said of similar mini-PC that I tested just couple of years prior this one.

Hardware:
- Intel N150
- 12GB RAM
- 500GB SATA/NGFF M.2 SSD
- 2x 1G Realtek NICs.

Currently serving:
- Home Assistant OS (with USB Zigbee adapter)
- Open WebUI
- Gitea
- Homepage
- SearxNG


Aeon - more like hybrid node than anything else. There is good potential to run mixed workloads. Right now it is somewhat under-utilized, and used mostly just testing different tools / platforms.

Hardware:
- AMD B550 -platform
- AMD 5600G
- 32GB RAM
- 1TB NVME SSD + 480GB SATA SSD
- 1x 1G Realtek + 1x 10G Aquantia NICs
- Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB
- 5x case-fans
- 850W ATX power source

Apex - 'heavy lifter' of this bunch. Purposed for AI and NAS.

Hardware:
- AMD X570 -platform
- AMD 5600X
- 48GB RAM
- 1TB NVME SSD + 240GB SATA SSD + 2x 16TB SATA HDDs
- 1x 1G Realtek + 1x 1G Intel + 2x 10G Intel NICs
- Nvidia RTX 4060 Ti 16GB + AMD AI Pro R9700 32GB
- 7x case-fans
- 1250W ATX power source

Serving:
- NAS (SATA controller passthrough)
- Ollama ROCm (AMD GPU passthrough)
- One test environment for ROCm Ollama/vLLM/llama.cpp, but currently the Ollama-only VM is in more regular use.
Nvidia GPU is not currently utilized, but most likely if (when) the ROCM works well enough at LLM generation tasks, this will be used in ComfyUI VM later on (which I currently run as part of the Fedora virtual workstation at Aeon -node).

Networking

24-port 1G managed D-Link switch handling most of the wired routing, with support of 24-port keystone patch-panel and 5-port 10G unmanaged TP-Link -switch.

TP-Link EAP -series WLAN Access Point keeping all those wireless devices joined in, whether they are part of IoT, Home, or Guest -network.

All gatekeeped by dedicated firewall-PC with 6 NICs, which 4 are trunked and LAGGed towards that D-Link main switch.

Network itself is VLAN heavy by design. Because of that and the fact that the services run just on 3 physical PC's there is not that much of actual network cabling needed, but still for home/homelab use in apartment building I would guess that 20 - 30 pieces of in-use network cables are more than average.

Designs are made for 137 VLANs (at documentation level), but as of the main switch has limit of 128 - only those are currently implemented. Cluster hosted services have each their own VLAN to live on, for better control and to limit possible compromised zones if shit hits the fan. The vast amount of VLANs are designed to be enough for (most likely) any of my future needs far to the future. There is currently 14 service -VLANs in use, but that amount varies almost weekly as I test new services and decommission not-needed ones.

Main VLANs that are not service -specific consists of; management access, backups, (Proxmox-related) corosync, home-lan, vpn, guest-net and IoT -devices.

All of the VLANs are split to 4 major logical firewall groups (or, 5, since those Proxmox services are split to coupe of different -zones), to make firewall rule management more straight-forward - and less prone to human errors.

Power management

This is pretty simple right now, but good enough for me.

Basicly the powering is being done with two rack-mounted 19" power panels/strips, which both has simple LED -power-meters for visual aid of current power usage. Strips itself are both plugged to individuals smart-plugs with power metering capability and those report the used energy to home assistant for more precise monitoring.

One of the strips is only used for the actual rack equipment, cluster PC's and networking. While the other one powers both 3D -printers and whatever is on that height adjustable desk.

Currently there is no any UPS solutions implemented, as I am rascal I guess, which everyone that I discuss the lab with seems to be very iffy about, but yeah, there has been several plans for it, but after all and as the lab itself is more of an testing / learning platform its just never have felt like worth investment.. especially as the electric grid is fairly consistent where I live.

The OS's and designs do change constantly anyway, as an example; half a year ago the firewall OS was different (and firewall-PC running on different CPU), there was bigger but non-height-adjustable work-area, and instead of Proxmox -cluster I was rolling with TrueNAS for most of my services.. if we go year back from that the mini-PC was different one and the network had completely different layout.. so.. if the lab breaks I just rebuild it - no big deal for me, which I do anyway time-to-time just for the kicks and giggles.