The evolution of a homelab...

I’ve been running a home lab now for a number of years and it was always a bit amateurish in my own eyes, mainly based around VMs and docker. With branching out into the Kubernetes world, I switched most of it up to run on k3s, but found the performance was limiting and not really representative of the customer environments I deal with (I use my homelab for a variety of testing for customer scenarios).

I recently upgraded the entire lab to run on a mixture of ESX7 and RedHat OKD 4 which has proved to be incredibly useful for my own knowledge of OpenShift / OKD (OKD being the opensource version of Openshift without some of the bells and whistles), being that it’s the leading K8S distribution.

I currently run the following applications in the lab:

This is just the major apps running, there are about a further 20 or so on the openshift that are temp installations. Nearly everything is automated and all builds are held on my Gitea server. I'm going to investigate linking the OpenShift with ArgoCD in the future to automate version deployment of apps, as this seems to be quite the fashion. All servers and applications are protected by either VBR 12 or Kasten to the QNAP S3, which is then duplicated out to a 10TB USB3 drive. All of this runs off a 24 core HP Z620 with 192GiB of RAM, and 8TB of NVMe, only hitting around 40% utilisation. I've had to tune a lot of the apps in OpenShift to remove the health probes, as they add a lot of overhead, as well as tailor some limits on the deployments and statefulsets to not overly consume resources. I used Komodor to do this as they recently added a rightsizing tool which can pinpoint the correct limits.

As you can see this is the investment of hundreds of hours of work and learning, but I don't see it as anything but a huge tool for education. I've found the use of a home lab to be one of the greatest tools in furthering my career, as access to resources and the ability to "tinker" is usually not greatly available for most people.

If anyone has any questions about how to start such a setup or just questions in general, please do ask...I'm always happy to help.