How I build my homelab infrastructure

Hardware

My infrastructure is based with hypervisor and the others devices are bare metal device.

Naming

The naming of my devices is based on the RFC2100. So each of my machine is named after a precious stone, which makes it easier to identify within my IPAM. This approach gives a consisten and human-readable namaing scheme, across my infrastructure.

Hypervisor

My hypervisor are refrubished 3 DL380 G9 servers. My choice for this devices are their scalability. This allow me to add a plenty of RAM and expansions like pci expansion cards. So for a long term use they are ideal. The downside of this devices is of course the power consumption, which is quite high

For the system parts my choice of hypervisor is XCP ng after spending a long time on Proxmox ( I might write another post about my migration from proxmox later). XCP-ng offer a true open-source more flexible hypervisor.

XCP-ng offers a true open-source equivalent to VMware, with a clean architecture that separates the control domain (dom0) from the guest VMs, while still running both on the same hypervisor level. This design feels very enterprise-grade and well-engineered. And some other feature are particularly appreciate:

• Native Terraform Intergration
• Centralized mangagement with XenOrchestra
• A built-in backup solution that just works perfectly for my needs

NAS

For my nas I choose the same chassis I use for my hypervisor. But with a diffrent configuration that enable me. It support 12 hard drives and support several additional pcie device.

For my NAS, I use the same chassis model as my hypervisors, but with a different configuration. It supports 12 hard drives and several additional PCIe devices.

Currently, I’m using 6× 8TB drives in a RAIDZ2 configuration under TrueNAS. In the future, I plan to add another set of 6× 12TB drives and expand my pool by striping two RAIDZ2 vdevs.

TrueNAS offers a simple yet powerful interface with plenty of features. Additionally, I have two Synology NAS units that I use exclusively for backups.

Routers

My routers are two small “shoebox-sized” devices:

One handles my main network

The other is my OTB (Over-The-Box) connection, linked to a cellular router

Both routers run VyOS, which I find to be the best OS for automation and configuration management.

Bare metal devices

Quartz

This device is my XenOrchestra controller. So this device control my 3 hypervisor. Today this machine is oversize for the job. So I want to reatributate another role and find a better device.

Azurite

This device is a raspberry PI use to monitor my UPS and this my monitoring machine