State of the Lab - 2023

Taking some inspiration from the more popular self-hosting YouTubers, I am going to start a yearly round-up of the current state of my homelab. So here we go, State of the Lab - 2023 edition…

Networking

My home network mostly consists of Unifi devices. That is; a Unifi Dream Machine, a USW-Lite 16 port POE switch, a USW Flex Mini, a US-8 8 Port POE switch, and a U6-Mesh AP.

This has been a great setup for me. Unifi is a great solution for homes that want easy management but the ability to configure advanced features. I have not ran into any of the software/firmware issues and all my products were bought before the supply chain issues.

Compute

The main portion of my compute are two HPE ProLiant MicroServer Gen10 Plus. I have the Xeon chip versions with the optional ILO out-of-band-management cards. These two are in an XCP-NG pool.

Storage

For storage I am using a Synology unit. It is the DS720+ with the DX517 expansion unit. That gives me a total of seven drive bays and two M.2 slots for cache SSDs.

Using Synology’s SHR for redundancy, I can use drives of different sizes. The drives are broken into two storage pools. One providing storage for the Synology OS and the other providing iSCSI LUNs for the XCP-NG cluster.

Projects

Portainer

I am running Docker with Portainer on the XCP-NG pool. I currently have Muse, a self-hosted Discord bot, and the monitoring tool Uptime-Kuma.

Backups

Most of my backup tasks are handled by a self-hosted Veeam instance. I am using their community edition, running on Server 2022, and backing up to my Synology. It currently backs up a few servers and does file level backups on one other desktop. These all run on a schedule and I have never had any issues.

Patch Management

This is something I hadn’t set up before, but has been a pretty slick addition. I am using ManageEngine’s Patch Manager Plus to report on vulnerabilities within my homelab, and also push out patches. Here is one expample of how the dashboard looks:

Identity Management

I have had an on-prem Active Directory domain set up for a while. I mainly use this for testing solutions in a lab environment. I also use it for authentication for a few apps (like ManageEngine above). New to my lab is Microsoft’s Azure AD. I am using Azure AD Connect to sync my on-premise directory to Azure AD. This has let me explore and test a whole lot more with Microsoft’s cloud offerings. I also explored Synology’s new C2 Identity Service, but wasn’t too impressed. Perhaps I will explore it later down the road.

Conclusion

I think that about wraps it up! I have plenty of ideas left to try out in 2023, but feel free to make suggestions at my contact info below.