my homelab

i primarily use (and sell) dell gear because from my jobs over the years thats what most places run. of course a few years ago i worked for an hp shop, and i had never touched hp server equipment before… which leads me to my present (albeit old af) homelab.

my homelab today is currently an hp proliant dl380 gen8:

the vmware esxi host itself is running a super old version. 6.7u3. even better is you can tell i just cloned my prior dell environment over because the esxi image is dell’s. lulz. on the whole vmware topic, broadcom absolutely sucks balls. they bought vmware, burned it alive, tarred the corpse, feathered it, tossed it in a fucking volcano and took a massive sized shit on the ashes.

they killed the free version. and then recently brought it back (vmware esxi8uSOMETHING). they killed the vmug subscription to get access to enterprise skus to learn. they completely priced out small to medium sized businesses. fuck broadcom. even with it being free again, i don’t trust those greedy bastards.

my plan is to move back to dell servers whenever i get some downtime and migrate to proxmox. but since we’re talking about my homelab, here’s what i’m running:

dc is my domain controller. i can honestly decom it but mon is still domain joined so i’d have to first remove it. i’m lazy. mon is my torrent box and has my direct attached storage on the front end. plex is my ubuntu plex box that has a share mounted back to mon for movies, tv, and music. pihole is to block ads at the dns level. im thinking of switching to adblocker, but again, i’m lazy. reason i’m thinking of switching is because it keeps blocking legitimate websites. it’s annoying. then we have kali, which is for good old kali linux. im not a 1337 h4x0r but when i do get some free time i enjoy exploring the tools. lastly my old vcenter server cluster (vcs7) from the days of yore. i can delete it but it’s nostalgic to me, ya know?

app is shut down at the moment of writing this which is a problem as that is my backup server lol. i back the direct attached storage on the server to a usb3 external dis mounted on the app server which runs robocopy once a night. obviously i haven’t been paying enough attention to it because its shut down rofl. also realizing i haven’t been getting my nightly email confirmations that trigger after the robocopy is complete. talk about #winning .. i need to look into that lol

from a hardware perspective, its got 1x 1tb sas drives in a raid1 that host the vms and vmware install. then i have 23 (24?)x900gb sas drives in a raid5 for front end storage. power draw is around 280w which i think is acceptable for an older gen8.

ill grab a pic next time i’m changing my hvac filter and will toss a pic up