Home Lab
Purposes
Simulation of Environments
To emulate as much as possible the situations in which our eventual open source system will need to be run in. SBCs like Raspberry Pi have great advantages for us.
- Very low power—can be as low as 2 to 5 W if using ARM (or other RISC) architecture. Important because it will be on 24 hours a day where it may be powered by a small, cheap solar setup.
- Extremely cheap to purchase and light to post.
- Some come with really good educational support.
Testing Of Software
SBCs are a cheap way of trying out different software (e.g. website and server monitors) before we need actual paid-for data centre hardware.
Possible Addition
StartOS
Download and installation instructions are here.
Here is their github page: https://github.com/Start9Labs/start-os
and an interview with more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0n9DRGJWr_0
and another interview with more of the philosophy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4FbsM7ZATI
Gallery
Run Proxmox on an old laptop. Try in case ARM is not working well:
ZimaBoard and ProxMox
ZimaBoard is a small x86 micro-server that very well could replace your Raspberry Pi. Featuring SATA, dual Ethernet, and PCIe, this board can be moulded to perfectly fit your production and homelab needs.
We could learn more about virtualisation, etc. relatively painlessly using a cheap board. Proxmox looks like a good thing to start off. Just install and use the web interface. Solving problems as they come up (and you actually need to solve them) is much more efficient than a course and the most expensive ZimaBoard is $200 so that’s a lot less than a Server Admin course.
Maybe some good prep stuff here first
Other Possibilities With Proxmox
ARM and Risc5 are preferable here due to low power consumption. AMD 64, etc. tend to use a lot of power and since this will be on most of the time, that makes a difference.
Or VIM4 might be good too. 219 also, but 4 cores instead of 8 and 8G ram instead of 4.