In the What are YOU self-hosting? thread, there are a lot of people here who are self-hosting a huge number of applications, but there’s not a lot of discussion of the platform these things run on.
What does your self-hosted infrastructure look like?
Here are some examples of more detailed questions, but I’m sure there are plenty more topics that would be interesting:
- What hardware do you run on? Or do you use a data center/cloud?
- Do you use containers or plain packages?
- Orchestration tools like K8s or Docker Swarm?
- How do you handle logs?
- How about updates?
- Do you have any monitoring tools you love?
- Etc.
I’m starting to put together the beginning of my own homelab, and I’ll definitely be starting small but I’m interested to hear what other people have done with their setups.
At home I have a Proxmox cluster consisting of two Dell R340 and one Intel NUC. There are 25 VM’s across all three machines. They do various development duties along with home assistant, plex, and Blue Iris. The rack lives in a closet under the stairs and I have fiber ran to my office. We did a massive renovation when we purchased so I wired the entire house since the walls were all opened. Average power draw is around 480 watts.
Here is a picture of the rack back when it was all R330. Those have since been sold and upgraded to R340. I added vents during the renovation. Inlet temps stay around the house ambient, and exhaust is about 20 degrees F hotter. I cover the front with additional sound baffles to better route fresh air and control noise. Its pretty much silent outside the closet.
This is the patch panel. I have perimeter cameras all the way around the house plus more than enough wifi access points. Each room also got 2x ethernet on each side, 4x total. My office has got 6x ethernet plus 4x fiber and a 2-inch conduit to pull whatever else I can think of later.
I use Grafana and custom-made scripts for monitoring and alerting. Most of the infrastructure is automated with scripts. One of these days Ill learn Ansible but I really enjoying just figuring it all out. This isn’t my job I just do it for fun. Here is the dashboard I run on one of my desk monitors.
I run my hobby websites, and my Lemmy instance, in the colo but its primary purpose is to be an offsite backup. Proxmox backup server performs best on SSD hence the large array. I also do a lot of travel for work so that’s my remote dev machine too. I run my own mail servers with some small VPSs acting as SMTP and IMAP bouncers to internal servers at home and in the colo working in parallel. HA proxy does the bouncing for high availability and dovecot and postfix do the heavy lifting with solr providing lighting fast search. I do use a third party for outbound mail for better deliverability.
Dell R350 - Colo Proxmox
Dell R340 - Proxmox Node 0
Dell R340 - Proxmox Node 1
Intel 7th Gen Nuc - Proxmox Node 2
This is mounted to the wall under my desk in a silent case. I use Verizon Wireless home internet as a backup and this server is the router. My entire closet rack can go offline and Ill still have internet access.
Dell R730 - GPU
Dell SC200 Disk Shelf 1
Dell SC200 Disk Shelf 2