When I started my studies in 2017 I quickly realized that I wanted to spend the 5 years of my master’s degree getting a mix of theoretical and hands on experience. My study programme is quite theory heavy so I needed to supplement in some hands on experience. The natural starting point for me was an Arduino, a temperature and humidity sensor, and a raspberry pi 3B. Little did I know that this would be the start of a borderline obsession!
Machines and infrastructure
This post will be an introduction to my home lab for reference in later posts about Kubernetes and infrastructure. My current homelab consists of 3 Raspberry Pi single-board computers, 1 model 3B and 2 model 4s. These were the original three machines that I got to start learning about Kubernetes. The 3B Pi is a bit lacking in resources in my current setup, but it is still pulling its weight. The model 4 Pi’s are of the 4GB variant, which is enough for running a k3s master mode, but any future purchases will probably be the 8GB models.
Raspberry Pi’s are very flexible little machines and fits well into most home labs. I would personally advise anyone that want to dabble in hosting any kind of service to buy a Raspberry Pi and start from there.
In addition to the Pi’s I have an old laptop that I no longer use set up. The laptop runs Rocky Linux, since the CentOS project went in a direction that I do not enjoy. This laptop is set up as a supervisor and only has KVM/QEMU and docker installed. The goal of the laptop is to be able to gain some more experience in the virtual machine world without any fancy GUI to do all the complex stuff for me. If you do not want to do too much terminal work I would advise you to install a supervisor like Proxmox on it, this will probably increase your efficiency by a lot.
Last but not least I have a NAS for storage. The NAS is primarily used for persistent storage that I mount in Kubernetes pods and general network storage. The NAS has a couple of 14TB NAS disks, that are configured in RAID1, installed.
All the machines are connected through a powerful switch that routes all node to node traffic and keeps the rest of the network less congested.
Future upgrades
After starting a lot of self-hosting and doing a bunch of projects I have learnt that a few high RAM powerful machines are nice to have so I plan to add a few additional machines with at least 16GBs of RAM each to my stash.
A nice quality of life upgrade would also be to purchase POE hats for the Raspberry Pi’s to reduce the amount of wiring in my server cupboard a lot.