HomeLab Hardware Tour (Early 2025)

[@TechnoTim]

Here are all of the videos mentioned in this tour! - [Placeholder for the 2025 Services Tour] - PoE Zigbee Hub with Home Assistant: kzbin.info/www/bejne/bpaXoJSLfdGAqac - High Availability PiHole with KeepaliveD: kzbin.info/www/bejne/noHJnGOnmZmre7s - NUT Server: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rKqlgWqtpbNqaMU - Plex & Live TV with HDHomeRun: kzbin.info/www/bejne/h2bSnKKvhcqqr7c - Low Power Cluster - Small, Efficient, BUT Powerful!: kzbin.info/www/bejne/bnXIeGanhJJ7f6M - I Colocated My HomeLab in a Data Center: kzbin.info/www/bejne/sJPOooWGfrqMd9E - I tried the HexOS Beta. Here's how it went.: kzbin.info/www/bejne/jKrcomOVlrSef9E - Mini Rack, HomeLab Stack - Mini Server Rack: kzbin.info/www/bejne/oXi9kmBuZq53fbs - Building My ULTIMATE Linux Workstation: kzbin.info/www/bejne/nZvCaJt4jcllrc0 - Is the UniFi NAS Pro Right for You? (UNAS-Pro Review): kzbin.info/www/bejne/hoOshqGFf7OUjdk - Building My ULTIMATE, All-inOne, HomeLab Server: kzbin.info/www/bejne/Z527hJedYp2YrKM - EVERYTHING You Should Know About the HL15 (HL15 Review): kzbin.info/www/bejne/h3i2kp1rib6IeJI - Getting the Most Performance out of TrueNAS and ZFS: kzbin.info/www/bejne/aYWYqHWQhNJnnrs - Scaling the PiKVM - Using the Raspberry Pi PiKVM with Multiple Machines: kzbin.info/www/bejne/l4DKlKSMmL5nj8k

[@anonymous762x56]

when does a homelab become a home data center 🤔

[@TechnoTim]

HomeLab is what you make of it :)

[@leoncioferreira570]

Its the friends we make along the way

[@patchshorts]

When it has a whole range of static ips that you can control the PTR records for.

[@joshua_lee732]

When you admit it.

[@TechnoTim]

@@joshua_lee732 💯😂

[@ChristopherBown]

Can't wait to see the services tour.

[@romayojr]

i always look forward to your homelab tour every new year 🔥

[@BulletsNBrass]

Glad to see I'm not the only person who's setup a whole network rack, whole structure wifi, and then slapped an AP on top of the rack because that room has lousy reception and since it's not public it's too much work to actually mount the darn thing.

[@TechnoTim]

@@BulletsNBrass 😅 low effort mount to get WiFi to the floor above

[@Psikeomega]

It took me a year to build up the "give a heck" to yank fresh cable to my other floors to wire in my APs (I'm very heavy lathe and plaster, so I don't pass a lot of signal through the house)

[@jackdawwastaken]

Big changes for me this year. I am increasing the size of my homelab by an infinite factor. By which I mean I'm transitioning from no homelab at all, to a couple of VMs running on an old laptop I just got working.

[@kevin.malone]

Laptops are a heavily underrated server machine. Power efficient, built in UPS. What's not to love?

[@UnknownEntity420]

Ive been toying with the idea of adding a laptop (proxmox) cluster to my homelab to play around with

[@ryanmalone2681]

@@kevin.malonenever thought of it like that but it’s so true.

[@jackdawwastaken]

@@UnknownEntity420 I'm using mine to learn my way around TrueNAS. Here in a couple of months, I want to build an actual NAS so my brother can record his youtube videos and I can edit them without having to move the mkv files with an external drive. Of course, then I'm gonna want to build a render server for my editor, and probably set up a home security system, and it'd be cool to be able to stream movies to the other rooms in my house and oh god, what have I gotten myself into?

[@jackdawwastaken]

@@kevin.malone that's exactly what I thought! Until I realized that my laptop has a bad battery and doesn't run unless it's plugged in, so I'm missing the UPS, but that's just a matter of wanting to spend the $30 for a new one

[@byKOGR]

Very nice and organized homelab!

[@TechnoTim]

Thank you!

[@MuchamadFatihurrahman]

a great homelab and it's a dream to have one like that from one of my favorite technology youtubers

[@minipie4017]

Bro I'm scared to see the power bill lol.

[@dank9561]

In the UK 460 watts continuous works out around $1770 USD per year in electricity cost.

[@Icydriveforza]

on one of the displays sad 330kwh last 30 days... So that times whatever electricity costs where u are at... quite a bit. and that i believe was only the network part..

[@WilReid]

@@dank9561 Your electricity costs are insane in the UK. I'll be taking down over 600 watts of Christmas lights this week, and the two months they ran a few hours every night will have cost me less than $40.

[@brockwilkie6022]

Every tech youtuber should plan on these at the beginning of the year. Yours are always at top of my list to watch.

[@markhamlee]

About a year and a half ago, I stumbled upon this channel because a Raspberry Pi climate monitoring project turned into "should I make a K8s cluster"? 18 months and a server rack later (and a 2nd waiting to be assembled).... a good 1/2 of my homelab started with videos on this channel. Thanks for all you do Tim.

[@BrokenGlytch]

Good to see as always. I've recommended your channel to others entering the tech field specifically for these annual homelab / services tours to get them started with the idea of homelabbing. As for my lab, I'm mostly trying to consolidate things down. After finally getting Grafana and Prometheus setup, I realized how vastly underutilized my servers are, so I'm reconfiguring my "AI server" to be my "everything server" so I can turn the other into a Proxmox Backup Server that's only on one or two weekends a month for backup capture. Not exactly moving to low power, but spending the power I use a little more wisely than just running everything 24/7 without enough demand for it.

[@guythis757]

these are fantastic, thanks! I think my favorite part about these videos is seeing what's possible - I'm probably never going to go all out like this, but there are definitely bits and pieces here that are inspiring ideas for my own homelab this year. Thanks again!

[@Sapious1]

Damn, that was a great tour. I am so envious.

[@Aimtjie]

Dream setup! You can move the PDU to the back, free up space

[@TechnoTim]

@@Aimtjie thank you! For sure, once I get low on space that’s the first to go!

[@MaikDiepenbroek]

Great and organised homelab, been watching you for a while. And gained a lot of insights for my own homelab which is no where near what you have running there. But enjoying every step of it and the learnings i get from it. Thanks for the content and this great video!

[@RYANRAZZIN]

my lenovo p710, 384gb ram and dual e5 2699v4 and rtx 4000 8gb server died the other week and im crying watching these vids, man i miss my all in 1 home lab, all my gaming servers, my nas, my jellyfin/ obs streaming pc server and more just waiting to be used again one day, great vid man! cant wait to see wat os's and services you are running and deffo cant wait for hexos to be more refined

[@jbauman100]

One of the best tech youtubers!

[@QSC0P3]

But can it run crysis?

[@Livewire1]

I don't have a HomeLab but this stuff fascinates me. Awesome setup.

[@gregoryaul2005]

That's one bad ass home lab👍

[@IEnjoyCreatingVideos]

Nice tour Tim! Thanks for always sharing with us!💖👍😎JP

[@mistakek]

Amazing homelab. Always gives me ideas for my own.

[@homelabjohn]

Its better than mine :) The MS-01 can be rack mounted using a 3d printed mount (2u) now four of these would be my dream setup. Depending on load all four would probably only pull 100watts and maybe on idle 50 to 75watts. Nice to watch the HomeLab tours and dream :)

Let's gooooo! Thank for putting this together!

[@Granar.]

Homelab of dreams right there!

[@stevenrogers1087]

One of my favorite kind of videos from you!

[@hugevibez]

Hey Tim, looking healthy :) You always have some really good ideas, like the separate UPS for network, I've been looking at getting a colo as it's really easy and cheap where I live, and I think I got the idea of implementing Terraform through Git from you as well (i use it to easily configure enterprise switches). Not much has really fundamentally changed this year except for the colo, so I guess not much inspiration this year, but I love these rack tour videos so I'm along for the ride anyway. Btw there's a guy selling 3D-printed half width rack mounting hardware for the MS-01 btw, so you can easily do an even cluster (which is annoying I know)

[@Awesumsawz]

Yooo! Sick! Just getting my HL going again for the first time in years. Thanks for the absolutely excellent content!

[@dukeseb]

I look forward to this every year

[@SOMRIK_0x1]

I would love to see more and more detailed tutorial videos about every service that ur home lab contains. Plz make❤

[@4eyesleo]

So many devices within such decent power draw (300-400W). Nice!

[@alexandzors]

Loving the lab tours Tim! I currently have a 3 node Optiplex micro cluster (added 2.5gb eth to them), an r440, and a custom built UNRaid server for Plex. This year I plan on building out a proper NAS solution that's easy to clone. Going to build a few of them and distribute to friends/fam so we can all do proper backups. If and when I finally get a permanent residence I'll be deploying my cluster of r730xd's. Though the power usage on those might be a lot 😅

[@buldezir]

seems like not enough power to run a few docker containers

[@GeekOfAllTrades]

HA PiHole .... GENIUS! I didn't know Unifi offered a managed PDU, that is sweet and super convenient if managed through the same dashboard, but can NOT be cheap lol. Your steel backer board for the ISP demarcation point looks SO lovely, more aesthetically pleasing than the MDF board we usually see. I'm gonna have to keep that one in mind for our next house

[@philarmishaw3730]

Amazing upgrade as was last years, and the year before that! Just as a heads up Truenas Scale has Nutserver built in now… it’s under services.

[@TechnoTim]

@@philarmishaw3730 so awesome! Thanks for the tip!

[@hagner75]

I don't feel bad about my cable chaos now. We're about the same. But nice homelab! :D

[@xU9aC6jQ5kR2zU0x]

I vertical mount my equiptment as well. Though, I 3D printed brackets for each device and printed some cable managment clips. I have one full size rack server that is vertical. I used a vertical server mount that mounts to the wall. I do not have much space (it's a utility coset) and a server rack would not fit. Even one full length server is as deep as the closet. So, I had to go vertical with everything and mount stuff to the wall/sheet of plywood.

[@Spiker985Studios]

Homelabs come in all shapes and sizes. Yours just happens to be sized and shaped as a closet

[@yunder.]

Excellent video. I love your lab! I have a very small one with two Proxmox nodes with Sophos firewall, Win10, Debian, and a modest TrueNAS instance. Tiny request to improve viewer experience: you could consider dropping the dB in the 32 Hz range. I noted several mic thumps as you were giving the tour.

[@fram1111]

I live in a real area but the great part is it's wired for fiber optic, so I paid the village, which is more expensive, or I pay Cable company, I get a bundle deal that keeps changing! I haven't checked out the village.

[@teugeneo]

wow, just 9 minutes in and I wouldn't be shocked if you have dual A6000 to handle compute.

[@JohnDoe1999-lg7mh]

Nice setup. I have the Sysracks 37U enclosure that I got in early 2024. Upgraded my APC standalone UPSes to CyberPower rack mounted units. One has an extra battery pack. I have stuff mounted both the front and back sides. Have 3 TrueNAS systems (main, backup & off-line archive), Main Proxmox Ryzen 9 5950X for VMs, HP micro PC running Proxmox running services for HA like Z2M, MQTT, Node-Red, ESPHome. Will be adding another Proxmox system system soon. Using the 8 port TESmart KVM along with a portable 15.6" LCD monitor as my KVM setup. No way, was I going to spend $2000 for a 1U unit. Monitor is always up and uses space but.... Looking at creating a 2.5GB backbone between the NASes and two bigger Proxmox system with 2 port LAGGs. 6 NIC port brick PC running pfSense. I want to make pfSense HA in the near future. Will do a lab bench POC first. My Rack is 98% production setup and have a small LAB env with switches, micro PCs for pfsense, proxmox and TrueNAS. Cable management can be a pain. I would have liked vertical PDUs but, you need bigger style rack cabinets for that. I also used the left side for power and the right for network. I ran the cable down the sides between the horizontal supports and the removable sides.

[@TofuPanda69]

Been waiting for this!

[@princemarkied8071]

Looking amazing man! I remember when you took that cage out to make room for the 3090. You know.. that would be a good print job for .. wait .. you already did the SSD caddies. I tend to type comments while still in the middle of a video :(

[@TylerR909]

Y'know, now that you mention it my server did go through some changes last year. Notably from not existing, to existing.

[@badespielzeug]

460 watts would cost $1,450 - $1,550 annually in Germany😢😢

[@docfornix]

Money well saved on heating 😅

[@dank9561]

In the UK 460 watts continuous would work out around $1770 USD per year.

[@Icydriveforza]

and that's only the nas, not including networking or hue...

[@tvoormijnser]

looking forward for the new mini rack video

[@jonjayb]

The most important video (part 1) of the year just dropped

[@sku2007]

L2ARC doesn't need a mirror

[@trexgamer73]

Awesome channel

[@joostul]

Yes Tim the cables are 'kind of a mess'

[@stepmback]

Show us the back of the main rack. Looks great from the front.

[@RoloSolis81]

Looking forward to the HL15 upgrades!

[@TechnoTim]

@@RoloSolis81 me too!

[@mfs5493]

I reckon this is all scrap electronic junk made to look impressive and purposeful.

[@StenIsaksson]

My change is that I'm actually going to start using the stuff I built. Besides my main PC I have a Proxmox PC, TrueNAS PC, Linux Server PC and a testing PC But I never really use them. I tried them out a bit and then I just had them power off all the time.

[@TechnoTim]

Sounds like a plan! I know what you mean, I have quite a few devices that I wipe and keep powered off. This year I am going to look into doing some more smart powering on and off of devices, maybe even on demand!

[@CrazyCat229]

Great setup. Any chance of you doing a How to Start a simple home lab? I honestly only need smaller stuff for now. I'm trying to get back into network engineering etc. My company closed my SOC after several years and all I was doing was responding to Security Alerts etc. I need to re-up my knowledge a lot. I have been out of the hardware/setup side of things for a long time. Thanks!

[@fram1111]

What is a PCU🤣 Nice network, thank you boss starting my own tube channel, and then I'll spread my wings when I can with discord and etc.

[@teromeehaley4612]

I am amazed that you didnt use the thunderbolt ports as a 25gb/s backhaul for your nucs proxmox cluster for HA.

[@socketwench]

If anything, I'd like to *start* home labbing. Two problems are, I don't know where to start, and I have next to no budget for hardware.

[@TechDadAdventures]

Who do you use for co-location? I host several servers and live in houston area and looking for something different.

[@maximustrust]

Hey man, nice setup! Do you use your server for work? I never understood the need for such huge enterprise server at home besides it being cool. But the electricity bill alone would make me not want something like thi 😂

[@wi1h]

his work is this channel..so yeah it's for "work". but also he just thinks it's cool probably. definitely completely overkill for a normal homelab, at least the networking parts. NAS and a proxmox cluster is pretty normal homelab stuff though

[@radeksparowski7174]

one day soon I will have a shoebox sized nas-firewall-ai assistent with 4 to 6 u.2 drives in 122TB capacity each in some exotic raid and nothing more, one newer beefed up workstation desktop -maybe keep the older one as backup - and some as terminal working electronics tablets, laptops, phones in the household which all soon be disappearing as they got embedded into the environment

[@unknowntotherestoftheworld]

Why not use OpenMPTCP for your routing if you have dual fiber? You can have seamless fail over and functional WAN bonding. Giving the culmination of both speeds while also allowing failover? There are some fairly budget 5gbps and 10gbps VPSs that have no bandwidth limit at the trade off of minimal storage capacity and compute, which is perfect for acting as your exit node.

[@oneamongmany1392]

Magnificent overkill - love it! Question on the 'wall of tech' - how is most if it secured? I only saw zip-ties on like 2 things. My lab sits accross 2 ikea peg boards and One been using their accessories and it kinda sucks.

[@2mustange]

I just need to start my homelab :( my networking is horrible and i can't afford to get anything decent.

[@Bearded-northern-guy]

well my "homelab" will not change this year that much. only adding a few 24TB Drives into my Ceph nodes. otherwise all stuff i'm changing this year is actually inside of datacenters, where my plan next year will be to consolidate most of it into colocation instead of renting bare metal servers :) a lot of things i just don't need to run at home with my slow internet connection, so i can rather run it there securely (e.g. less likely that it will burn down or gets flooded) and then only having my primary NAS, some radio related equipment and my Pi hole at home. that way i have a dedicated backup target that i have full control over in an area that is a few 100km away from where i'm actually living. but that is for next year ... will already prepare a lot of things this year so i know exactly what i need. will definitely be a fun next two years for me :)

[@gravity_au]

I'd love to change my homelab with one of those spare CPU'S you have. I'll pay shipping to Australia... 😅

[@ctoney1992]

I see a few comments about power, but I do wonder how many people get dedicated power and cooling upgrades for their homelabs? Everything I have is low power laptops and mini PCs, but it always in the back of head. Like how many more devices can I add before I trip the breaker. 😅

[@ChristopherBown]

What is the Zigbee network interface device you are using, that you moved all of the Hue stuff to? I don't see it in your list, sorry if I missed it.

[@ChristopherBown]

Nevermind... As soon as I post I find it in the list. Figures! Thanks!!!

[@Valentin-qe9pl]

20:33 Coud you explain what the reason is for having 5x striped mirrored storage? Why not 2 vdevs with RaidZ2?

[@jeffherdzina6716]

So did you have to have an electrician come in and upgrade the power to 220 outlets, or change/upgrade the breaker box ?

[@TechnoTim]

My server room is all on the same circuit (standard 120) and I have yet to cause the breaker to trip. I do have a sub panel that's been there, but I didn't do any upgrades to it, just added those outlets myself when I remodeled that room.

[@keninen2245]

@TechnoTim Unifi just released their new „zone-based“ firewall rules. Are you able to upgrade your rules before showing your services and how these are restricted by your firewall? Just to let you know: Your videos are really inspiring me. I just started my homelab journey. Configured my unifi gear yesterday just to have them release a major version update😂 As I‘m a software engineer, I‘m used to migrations but did not expect them so soon😂 Btw: are you willing to answer me another question? How would you describe your workload 50% yt , 50% day job dev or is it leaning more into yt?

[@looper6120]

Nice setup as always! Maybe too early to ask, for the service part, when you are running proxmox cluster for HA, did you ever encounter the problem when you restart one node, other nodes start fencing themselves and also restart? It happens pretty randomly for some reason.

[@BrianPuccio]

21:39 why do you mirror L2ARC cache drives? Also what’s your L2ARC hit rate?

[@mpacholik]

What I’ll be changing in my homelab? Starting a home lab (maybe) haha

[@stevenharvey1375]

Where did you get the metal sheets for your tech wall? I could use a few to clean up my wall space.

[@TechnoTim]

It's linked in the description, look for "Wall Control"

[@lolosandros]

Nice Video! I just wanted to ask why you hooked up the Aggregation Switch to the 48 Port Switch? Couldn't you just plug it into the GW so that if the 48 Port SW goes down it doesn't cut your Aggregation Switch?

[@r0bo11]

Tim, what issues are you having with the Tesmart KVM switch, and will there be an official PiKVM switch update/review in an upcoming video?

[@Fred_vBrain]

Great tour as always. Maybe I missed something but you said the 3rd DNS is here if the whole rack is down. But when the whole rack is down, so is all your network connectivity right?

[@xArratax]

I'm using one hp elitedesk 800 g2 to run all my Services and my node is at

[@wi1h]

most of it is networking stuff for small to honestly medium sized businesses, aka completely overkill for a homelab. he doesn't have that much compute running either, considering it's only pulling ~500 watts. i think my plex/NAS combined uses about the same power under max load (transcoding, downloading, and streaming to multiple users)

[@hw2508]

9:29 this white cables should be tidied up. However, pretty impressive. But what would be the stock price of all this, just for reference. Regarding the UPS: You should take a look at the runtime when it actually runs on battery. Some UPS, especially with old batteries, might not be that accurate with the runtime they calculate.

[@praetorxyn]

I am so jelly. I want that Seasonic / Noctua power supply and it doesn't even seem like you can buy it, which is weird. When you install that, can you do a video on it? I think I heard that the backplane in the HL15 is wired for the Corsair pinouts or something, so won't you have to rewire the backplane?

[@Tr1pke]

Hi there, how far can zigbee devices reach to the hub? Is one enough for a whole house ?

[@TechnoTim]

Zigbee devices create a mesh network, so in theory each one only needs to be able to communicate with the next. My Zigbee network goes outside to my outdoor lights and even reaches the smart zigbee plugs I have in the detached garage with this single adapter. I also have a video on this hub on my other channel, Techno Tim Tinkers

[@TechnoTim]

Here is my other channel that showcases it, don't forget to subscribe! www.youtube.com/@TechnoTimTinkers

[@yerachmielb1]

At the moment, my "homelab" is an old laptop, and it's basically strong enough to run as a NAS. That's it. I got nowhere to put anything else. 😒

[@kofeyh]

Please tell me there were no spinning hard drives in the rack being moved (oh no, there were); I physically winced seeing a powered on rack being shunted around. Interesting tour all the same.

[@eh5806]

Question about your 4-tuner HDHomeRun: Since it can tune 4 channels at once (speaking in the RF sense of the word), can it demux and stream out all the sub-streams at the same time, which would potentially be 12-16 streams depending on where you are, or did they limit the device to 4 total streams (as opposed to channels) by only allowing it to demux and process one stream per tuner? It's not 100% clear from their website, but I would think if they were able to use every stream on a channel they would advertise it loudly.

[@SurenCao]

Great colo place

[@LonewolfID]

What do you do for living? Are You System admin? Devops? 😮

[@Mavo1989]

So really most of it is not used is from what you have said in really each section.... its alot of gear mainly all network without being enterprised managed gear... the key takeaway for 90% of people who watch the channel just buy some NUC's / mini pc's with a small POE switch and use a Mini Rack like you have built and its perfect for 99% of scenarios and work... have a main PC for all the VS code and workstation.... i got rid of cisco UCS stuff, Sun micro servers and all the enterprise cisco network gear that was really good to learn with properly with windows domains, redhat openshift along with vsphere to do full infrastructure architeture and engineering for hybrid cloud solutions to AWS and Azure with S2S and P2S VPN to really accelerated the career... but now just scaled it right back and still do the same workloads on mini NUC's as a Dev/UAT enviroments - Cluster for windows and cluster for Linux/Openshift and use devops/ansible to do proper 1-1 enterprise deployments for cloud then delete it and start fresh again with a quick terraform modules

[@mlegos]

Can you run the fiber directly to your router?

[@Cynyr]

how are you liking your century link service?

[@carl_thunder]

Which power cables are you using for the PDU?

[@warriorclassmedia]

Wow 😮🎉

[@JohnWeland]

Any idea of any of those NUCs can do 10G? I am currently running 3 Dell r620s with 20c/40t (dual Xeon) 128g memory. But with a $500 utility bill I want to scale back the lab

[@madaqqqaz]

how much are you paying for electricity?

[@Hafenstrand5]

What is the standby power consumption of that room?

[@zacp6339]

How did you get your LAG working on True-NAS? I have two Intel X550-T2s, one each in my Proxmox and TrueNAS servers, both into my NetGear MS510TXM. LACP (layer 3/4) LAG works great in Proxmox, but fails every time during the configuration test in TrueNAS (also gives no errors, just fails and resets). I'm pretty sure I'm missing something simple.

[@Nameless37]

The wall of stuff; what are those panels you mounted everything to?

[@syndaquil4838]

Metal pegboards. You can get similar things from hardware stores

[@SeanDion]

How did easy/effortlessly migrate your hue devices in Home Assistant from the Hue integration to the generic Zigbee? I've been wanting too, but scared of all that effort.

[@TechnoTim]

@@SeanDion no easy way but my recommendation is to factory reset 1 device at a time. That makes it really easy to discover and name them properly in Home Assistant! It was actually much easier than I thought it would be and I still get firmware updates over the air! I have a video on the process on my Techno Tom Tinkers channel!

[@SeanDion]

@@TechnoTim Even with all the scenes/etc? Thanks for the response!

[@TechnoTim]

I think you can import scenes into home assistant (using the Hue integration, then I think delete it) but I didn’t, just recreated the ones I actually use

[@RobinSchneegans]

Thats an way more Professionell "HomeLab" than the DataCenters we have at Work lol.