My Second Homelab Setup (2021)
Back in 2021, I measured the power consumption of my HP Elite 8000 based Homelab Server. It was around 80 Watts. I didn't think this was much, until I realised it was running 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
0.08 x 24 x 365 = 700kWh at 18p/kWh (in 2021 prices), that works out to about £126 a year. This is quite an expensive way to heat the cupboard under my stairs, so I looked at more power-efficient solutions.
What I found was a second-hand fanless PC. An itona VXL LQ50, rated at 65 watts(max) and 7 watts (idle) costing £45. This came with a 4 core processor, albeit running at 1.5Ghz, as opposed to 2.6GHz for my current Intel setup. However, my server never seems to be under any computational or speed constraint (except maybe when its re-booting), so I was not too concerned with the sacrifice in processor speed. The unit came with 4GB of RAM, which was easily upgraded to 8GB (£6). What was of more concern was the small size of the SSD (only 32GB). This meant I had to pay much closer attention to the Proxmox installation options in order to best utilise this space. I set the local storage (for the Proxmox OS installation) to 6GB and the swapfile to zero (I have plenty of RAM), leaving the rest of the space for the lvm containing the actual virtual machine and container images. I added a 16GB usb stick for the "static" storage (CT templates and image backups).
I was not comfortable with running pfSense within my Proxmox server, as it felt like I had too many eggs in one basket, so I have temporarily reverted back to my standard BT Hub modem/router gateway (until I can get round to building a dedicated pFSense hardware router).
The final problem is how to provide the bulk data storage. I have two old Buffalo NAS devices. A 1GB Linkstation Duo and and a 2GB Linkstation Live. These devices are both over 10 years old and whilst they do still work, they are essentially obsolete. The manufacturer has long since ceased support and the last software update was several years ago. These devices only support Samba V1.0 which has long since been deprecated. I have managed to update both of these devices to Samba V2.0, but this is still an outdatated version (Samba 3 is the latest now). Anyhow, it works, with the Linkstation Duo acting as my primary data storage and the Linkstation Live as the backup. The process of setting up these two old NAS drives to work with Proxmox containers was pretty involved, so I'll aim to cover it in some detail in a later blog if there is sufficient interest.