Homelab Idea

SO, I’ve wanted to make something of an awesome homelab for a long time. I’ve recently had the opportunity to be able to work on it a little bit more, and so I’m going to document my journey.

I need to first lay out what I expect or envision for my homelab environment. After doing some research (sic, watching a few YouTube videos),

• I think that I’d like to learn some virtualization and utilize it on a server.
• I like the idea of a virtualized workhouse of a machine that I can log into and run big/extensive processing jobs.
• I also like the idea of a virtualized pfsense box that can help direct and segregate and secure my network.
• I’ve toyed with the idea of running thin clients for the family, with a shared home directory and scratch directory
• But mostly, I want to try to have a nice, secure file server.

In order to give this a go, I’ve started with some used enterprise hardware. I bought a used Poweredge T320 server tower with 8 SAS drives. I stuck a small 16GB SSD into it for the host drive, as I had it laying around. It has a DVD drive, which I may upgrade later (as I have a Blu-ray drive around here somewhere) so I can rip my DVDs onto the server, when I find the time.

So, that’s an over view of what I’m hoping to achieve, and what I’m working with in terms of hardware. More to come soon!

If you’re doing something similar and have great ideas, let me know below (If I’ve figured out how to turn on the comments), or feel free to drop me a line on the contact page.