Since reaching my goal of what I want in the first version of my home lab (Ver 1.0), I figure it's a good idea to share about the planning, progress, and the decisions behind setting this up.

People can go crazy with their HomeLab setup, spending big dollars on hardware, spaces, electricity bills, etc. As a newbie in the field, my focus is to build something small, doesn't cost a lot, and won't require me spend more time maintaining up than using/learning what these hardware can do.

- Cheap/old hardware as much as possible: I did end up buying some new ones, but it wasn't very expensive (cost below).
- Consuming little power & virtually no noise: focusing on smaller devices has its advantage as I won't be paying a lot in my electricity bill, and maintain low noise environment in my apartment.
- Enough hardware to run things: small doesn't mean it has to be very limited in its capacity, I want hardware that'll allow me to do almost everything that I wanted and more.

I'm happy to report that I've achieved these goals with the version 1.0. Compare the stock Roger's modem/router combo, this is a huge upgrade that'll enable me to do very interesting things in my local network.

I'll try to breakdown as much as possible the setup, & the decisions behind it.

: Zotac CI 323 - a zero fan mini PC, I chose this because of the 2 network ports, which makes it perfect for running PfSense, a Router/Firewall OS that provides lots of customed options for managing the home network.
    - PC Spec: Intel Celeron J1900(quad core, 2.0GHz, up to 2.41GHz), 8GB DDR4 RAM.
    - This PC is designed with a big heat-sink and delivers an unnoticeable level of noise.
    - However, there're some issues with Pfsense and the Realtek NIC driver, which makes my Internet intermittently fail. The fix for it is installing a [different driver](https://www.reddit.com/r/PFSENSE/comments/t872mx/fix_issues_with_realtek_nic_on_pfsense_260/), so far it's been stable.
    - Cost: 250CAD

: I wanted to have a basic layer-2 switch that provide enough ports. The hardware is Netgear GS310P, 10 ports, with POE (power over ethernet) up to 45W. Cost: 100 CAD

: since I still need Wifi in the house, I got the Unify Wifi 6 Pro which support Wifi 6 & 2 band wifi (5Ghz, 2.5Ghz). This AP only works with POE, hence the purchase of the switch above. Cost 150CAD. A single Wifi AP is sufficient for the size of the place I'm currently living, more APs will probably be needed once I move into a bigger place.


 Beelink Mini, this is the only new purchase.
    - After doing some research, this NAS seems to be a perfect options for my setup, as it's very small, support up to 6 MVNE SSD (max 24TB), almost silent as the design is (again) a big heat sink wrapped by SSD slots. (Pic at the end)
    - The spec is also pretty decent with the Intel N150, 12GB DDR5, built in Power Supply, 64 GB eMMC to install OS so it doesn't eat up the extra SSD storage
    - Cost 205USD (about 280 CAD) - bought during their promotion so it's a bit cheaper than now. I also learned that they released a 16GB version which is currently at 309 USD.
    - At this moment, I'm only using one M2 stick that cost about 100CAD just so I can setup the NAS, the plan is going to purchase more M2s, which is going to be the most expensive things I'll need to get in the next while.



: I got 3 mini HP PCs on Marketplace for quite reasonable price, 350 CAD for all 3.
    - Spec for all 3 is Intel i5 - 8500T: an 8th gen Intel processor, 6 cores/6 threads with lower voltage (35W), 256GB SSD, 16GB DDR4 RAM.
    - This is perfect to setup a Proxmox cluster with 3 nodes

The total costs so far plus some other peripherals like RJ45 cables, cable management, power, etc. is about 1.7K CAD. Not too bad of a price for a home setup, though I figure this is just the beginning.

With this setup in place, I can start doing quite a number of things

- Pfsense Router: allow to setup VLANs, network-wide DNS, VPN, and a whole lot of other features that I would love to dive deeper into.

- Switch: also support VLANs tagging. The GS310P is a layer 2 switch so it can be used for separating networks & improve some network security & performance.

- NAS: Start storing & sharing content across my home network: although this is just 1TB for now, it does allow me save and setup data. 

I installed TrueNas, which also have options to run things like Syncthing, Plex server, etc. Although it's limited by the N150 chip, so I probably won't be running more than 3 services at the same time, plus lots of these services can be ran on the Proxmox cluster instead.

- Proxmox cluster: using the 3 servers, I have enough RAM (64GB), CPU Cores (12) to run multiple containers & VMs simultaneously , with some High Availability. Software I'm thinking of running are Calibre server, Prometheus, VPN server, Plex server, Pi-hole.

https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ooc3m5ke/production/1cd9241ba2d8b10357124f91952cccf87824a79a-1581x1096.png

One of the other aspect of having access to these new software, I can start learning & figuring out more things, learning is also the goal here.

Some of the immediate upgrade I'm foreseeing are:

- More SSD for the NAS: planning to only get 4TBs to fill out all the available space supported, I can also setup data storage with better backup algorithms with TrueNas. 4TBs M2 SSD are still quite expensive (about 350CAD per piece right now), so I will be adding those very gradually.

- Another cheaper NAS plan is to use my desktop PC as another NAS device since it support HDD.

- RAM upgrade for the Proxmox cluster, aiming for 32GB each. The more RAM the better

- A Kubernetes cluster: I already have a [Pi Turing], so going to get 4 PI Compute Module to make a Kubernetes cluster for learning purposes.

- Travel router: so I can securely connect to my lab at home when on a trip somewhere

- Upgraded network speed: right now everything is on a theoretical limit of 1Gbps, as my usage (especially for NAS) increases, I'm looking to up my game in local network speed: which includes new cables, devices.


- The [DeskPi RackMate](https://deskpi.com/collections/deskpi-rack-mate) This looks pretty cool, though I need to do some planning to fit everything in an 8U, which already doesn't fit my bookshelf.