Jay’s Homelab
A Timeline of Jay’s Homelab – 2017 to Present!
2017
In 2017 Jay began his journey into infrastructure by installing Windows Server 2012 R2 ono an old laptop and experimenting with Hyper-V.
He used windows server backup onto the portable USB HDD and the whole project ran over a 300mbps Powerline Ethernet Adapter.
2018
In 2018, Jay liked how things were going so he started learning to use Unraid for mass storage (approx 2-3TiB of storage at this point) using old hardware into a cheap amazon server case.
He also bought a Dell Poweredge T30 which replaced the old laptop as his hypervisor (Windows Server 2016)
2019
In 2019, Jay expanded the networking part of his homelab by buying a 16 port Ubiquiti PoE Switch and an access point.
He also got his own broadband connection installed (while living with a parent) to tinker with all he wanted as well as now having a routable static IP address.
2020
In 2021, Jay had experience of 3-4 years of networking and server infrastructure, so he decided to buy a refurbished server from Amazon (Dell Poweredge R710) and multiple 2TB HDDs.
However, he did not realise at the time that this server was nowhere near performant enough for his requirements (As he was now hosting gaming servers).
2021
He also added a MikroTik RB3011 to his setup to replace the TP-Link home-grade router.
Later in 2021, Jay had added a new Dell Poweredge R730 to his fleet of hardware which became his main hypervisor (Devastator) with Windows Server 2019 installed.
He then turned the R710 into a NAS using unraid and migrated the data from his old Unraid server.
2022
In 2022, Jay bought a proper server cabinet rather than an open-frame Rack in an attempt to dampen the noise output from the servers running in his home office.
He also rack mounted his desktop PC to reduce the footprint on his desktop and open it for other things.
2023
In 2023, Jay made the jump from MikroTik as his firewall appliance to PFSense running on the old Dell T30 tower server (temporarily) with the goal to upgrade to a Netgete appliance for PFSense in the future.
He also replaced his Unraid installation with TrueNAS scale for his mass storage device (Now totalled at 14TiB after 2 drives going to redundancy on Raid Z2.
Not pictured is also a secondary redundant NAS also running TrueNAS Scale which replicates data from the first NAS onto it. The Goal will be to move this NAS off-site and replicate over the internet.
2024
In 2025, Jay operates a steady homelab with a whopping 62TB of raw storage.
From top to bottom he uses the following equipment:
- Unifi USW-16 150W 16 Port PoE+ Switch
- MikroTik RB3011
- HPE Officeconnect 1820 Series Switch
- Lenovo Thinkcentre M710 – Running PFsense
- Dell Poweredge R730 with 2x 250GB SSDs, 4x 1TB SSDs and 10x 300GB SSDs running Proxmox Virtual Environment
- HP Micro Server running Proxmox Backup Server
- HPE Proliant DL380 G9 with 4x 12TB HDDs, 6x 1TB SSDs and 2x 250GB SSDs
With this current setup Jay is maximising the efficiency of the servers and working on automating processes such as diving deep into Home Automation
