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I bet that many of you have some VERY impressive home lab setups….so let’s see them!

Share your home lab or home office setup for bragging rights and internet points!

Up until recently, I was rocking a dual E5-2670 SR0KX setup - these chips were incredibly popular a few years ago as datacenters were dumping them out by the thousands on the 2nd-hand market. I paid about $70 each about 5 years ago for them. Also picked up a used motherboard and 128 GB of memory, a case that supported the weird form factor of the motherboard (EEATX).

I ran a VMware 6.7 setup with single-node VSAN using a consumer SSD and standard 3 TB disk picked up off ebay - was rock solid and performant - single node VSAN improves performance dramatically, even if it completely lacks redundancy.

Nowadays I do less infrastructure-based technical stuff, so my lab consists of a few raspberry pi’s running docker containers. I use portainer primary for managing those - no need to venture into K8s or K3s just yet, but on the todo :)

 


My homelab is retired, as everything runs within nested hyper Visors on powerful work/business servers.

So here is the HomeLab from almost 10 years ago

The photo’s not that sharp - must have been taken with a “Potato Cam”

Its 4 x HP MicroServers.

Each was running a dual core ADM Athlon 1.3Ghz chip.

Each Server had 16GB RAM and could hold 4 x 3.5 inch disks - though could be hacked to hold additional 2.5 inch disks

 

One Server was a dedicated FreeNAS box serving 8TB

The other 3 were VMware Servers iSCSI attached to the FreeNas

This ran CommVault and at times was taken to customer sites for a ‘full demo’ with one ESX Server as the ‘Primary Data Centre’, the other ESX Server as the ‘remote’ across the WAN datacentre

Some tiny SSD’s (16GN, 32GB) acted as DDB and Index Storage

You could ‘physically’ pull the power on a server to demonstrate an entire Datacentre failure and how DASH copies worked etc etc.

As there was no DRAC or ILO the black box on the desk with 4 push buttons was a VGA 4:1 to allow the console of any server to be seen on the monitor.

With some careful management - you could get a moderate number of VM’s ‘running’

The entire setup eventually grew to 8 HP MicroServers, and SSD’s

The benefit was - incredibly low power consumption and almost no noise

Fond memories

 


Those HP MicroServers back then were absolute bargains and quite flexible with the right mods. https://labgopher.com/ seems to be the go-to site now for trying to snag a bargain. 


My current lab is a Dell R620 scavenged from our last DC clear out. Dual Xeons E-3-2640 and 184GB of ram, running Vcentre 6.7 currently. This is good enough for my test and teaching lab when I need something better than the EA labs for a specific demo.

With power costs rising in the UK, am thinking about lower power alternatives. As this does use some juice.

 

 


That’s a good point about power.  What are you considering?


Was considering Intel NUC or similar things seen a few good setups on r/homelab using old SFF PC (thinkstations). Still investigating. 


Definitely a good option.  Those little boxes do so much with such a small desktop imprint.


Is it possible to run Commvault at home?  Is there an inexpensive homelab version, or a Community Edition?


@SC2021 , reach out to your account rep and see what they can provide.  They may have NFR options for you.


Ooh I love this thread!

I have a 25u xrack I picked up for a steal locally and happily sits in my basement ever since. 

Rackmounted we have:
Dell R210 II
Dell R720 dual E5-2640 | 256gb ram | plenty of quick storage
TP-Link TL-SG3428X (24pt 1gb + 4 SFP+)
Silverstone 4u 20 bay sas3 chassis DAS connection to the R720 all flash storage

The R210 II is mostly game servers, personal media,etc

The R720 is the real workhorse running esxi/vcenter and hosts active/tpassive Commserves, standalone ma, web console, AD, CA, and a few random test vm’s

Future plans involve more complex network configurations with the capabilities afforded to me from the recently added switch and experimenting with other features, platforms, etc
 


Mine runs in the cloud as well, so nothing fancy to show :-| I do like the idea from @SC2021 to introduce a community version of Commvault but I think one of the issue that will come along is the licensing of SQL which would make it very expensive. 


Photos refuse to upload but I am running a Single esx-i host running on a super micro Xeon-D 1541 with 64GB of ram

 

Running a Nas vm of 

8*8TB Toshiba HDD and 4x1TB Sata 3 SSD in Raid 0 

Connected via a Unify Dream machine running 3 LR Access points.

 

 


@SC2021 , reach out to your account rep and see what they can provide.  They may have NFR options for you.

Can you put together some kind of FAQ for this?

I think this would be really useful.


Mine runs in the cloud as well, so nothing fancy to show :-| I do like the idea from @SC2021 to introduce a community version of Commvault but I think one of the issue that will come along is the licensing of SQL which would make it very expensive. 

There is a “free” version called Microsoft®️ SQL Server®️ 2019 Express:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=101064


Hi, I’m new to Commvault Environment, kindly advise what is best practice to be consider for HOME LAB.


Hi, I’m new to Commvault Environment, kindly advise how to use this.


My homelab is retired, as everything runs within nested hyper Visors on powerful work/business servers.

So here is the HomeLab from almost 10 years ago

The photo’s not that sharp - must have been taken with a “Potato Cam”

Its 4 x HP MicroServers.

Each was running a dual core ADM Athlon 1.3Ghz chip.

Each Server had 16GB RAM and could hold 4 x 3.5 inch disks - though could be hacked to hold additional 2.5 inch disks

 

One Server was a dedicated FreeNAS box serving 8TB

The other 3 were VMware Servers iSCSI attached to the FreeNas

This ran CommVault and at times was taken to customer sites for a ‘full demo’ with one ESX Server as the ‘Primary Data Centre’, the other ESX Server as the ‘remote’ across the WAN datacentre

Some tiny SSD’s (16GN, 32GB) acted as DDB and Index Storage

You could ‘physically’ pull the power on a server to demonstrate an entire Datacentre failure and how DASH copies worked etc etc.

As there was no DRAC or ILO the black box on the desk with 4 push buttons was a VGA 4:1 to allow the console of any server to be seen on the monitor.

With some careful management - you could get a moderate number of VM’s ‘running’

The entire setup eventually grew to 8 HP MicroServers, and SSD’s

The benefit was - incredibly low power consumption and almost no noise

Fond memories

 

Nice


Echoing what a lot of people are saying here, I’d definitely be interested in a NFR license for my homelab. I’m using Veeam now, but I’d like to use Commvault as that’s what I use at work to back up many petabytes of data.


Not a HW post, but I’m running VMs on RHEL 9 using KVM.
I have Alma/Rocky 8/9 templates to quickly deploy new VMs.
 


Thanks,
Scott
 


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