Homelab 2019

[cw823]

Figured I'd detail my homelab here, especially as I make a few upgrades.

Physical Hardware:
ESX1 - Xeon E3-1265L v3 / 16GB ECC UDIMM / 80GB S3500 SSD (OS) / Intel X520-DA2
ESX2 - Xeon E3-1265L v3 / 16GB ECC UDIMM / 80GB S3500 SSD (OS) / Intel X520-DA2
ESX3 - Xeon E3-1265L v3 / 16GB ECC UDIMM / 80GB S3500 SSD (OS) / Intel X520-DA2
ESX4 - Xeon E3-1265L v3 / 16GB ECC UDIMM / 80GB S3500 SSD (OS) / Intel X520-DA2

NAS1 - Norco 4220 / Xeon E5-2630L v2 / 128GB ECC RDIMM / 80GB S3500 SSD (OS) / 5x Fusion-IO 1.2TB (RAIDZ NFS share to ESX) / Intel X520-DA2 / H310 IT v20
NAS2 - Norco 4220 / Xeon E5-2630L v2 / 128GB ECC RDIMM / 80GB S3500 SSD (OS) / Array1 - 9x8TB RAIDz2 / Array2 - 9x4TB RAIDz2 / Intel X520-DA2 / H310 IT v20 / H310 IT v20 / H310 IT v20 / Intel X520-DA2

Brocade ICX6610-48 with full licensing (courtesy of STH forums)

ESX HA Cluster:
ESX1-ESX4 are in a HA ESX cluster of four nodes, running around 20 VMs (detail to follow). I can safely tolerate a 2node failure with 4hosts. All storage is on NAS1 across the Fusion-IO array. NFS speed tests around 1GB/s R/W for my VMs.
I utilize a VMUG Advantage yearly subscription for licensing.
I run a virtual vcenter server, but it does not run inside the HA cluster, instead running on NAS1 which is actually a ESX box with a virtual NAS appliance. It is stored on the same Fusion-IO array as the other VMs

VM details:
I have ~5 server 2012 boxes running different services, including DNS, DHCP, AD, WSUS, BlueIris
I have 1 server 2012 box running "applications that let me maintain my plex library", including MediaCenterMaster (highly recommend)
I have 13 Ubuntu 18.04 server running plex. When I began sharing my plex library other users, I ran into an issue where two friends sharing the same plex server were watching the same TV show, and it was messing up the watched/unwatched for each user. I now have a separate Plex VM for each user with whom I am sharing. Those VMs are allocated with 4vcpu, 1GB vmem, 200GB vdisk, with each VM limited to 2 remote streams (capped at 4Mb 720p). All of the Plex VMs are also running PlexPy to give me a little more visibility into Plex performance

Hardware location:
My crawlspace. I have two dedicated 15A circuits with an APC 1300 UPS on each, with 2 ESX nodes and 1 NAS plugged into each.

2019 plans:

Array reconfig
I have 6x6TB HGST drives on the array to copy the data on the 9x8TB array to in preparation for:
I am expanding my main array to include all of my media, instead of my current 9x8TB and 9x4TB arrays. In my current array setup, I would need 9 more drives to expand my array of 4TB or 8TB drives, which was poor planning on my part. My plan is to copy all of the data on my 9x8TB (~50% full) to the 5x6TB temporary array, then recreate my main array as a ZFS array with 5 devs of 3 drives each. This will provide me with two important things: 1) I can tolerate 5 drive failures without loss of data, and 2) I can now expand the array just 3 drives at a time. I believe I will end up with about 72TB of usable space.
My plan is to then use the 6TB drives and 4TB drives in an unraid box at an offsite location with a complete copy of my data.

 

[wagex]

this blows mine out of the water lol.

server 1: i5-2400, 16gb ram, 5x 2tb hgst, server 2012 r2 datacenter with hyper-v (main host / sotrage server)
-vm1: debian stretch, docker host: jackett, radarr, sonarr, teamspeak, plex server, tautulli, haimdall, keepass
-vm2: Turnekey's LAMP server: running wordpress, simple invoices, and a wiki. ( www.wagex.org )
-vm3: pi-hole on debian jesse
-vm4: transmission-VPN: running transmission torrent client, and openvpn connected to PIA with custom boot / connection scripts.

server 2: i5-4570, 16gb ram, 1x 240gb ssd, server 2016: (testing / AD-DC)
-security cameras running ivideon on host (because of intel quicksync)
-hyper-v with 3 windows vm's and 1 docker vm for testing purposes
-Domain Controller and active directory roles enabled

server 3, fm1 athlon 2650, 8gb ram, 250gb ssd, 2x1tb seagates in raid 1: (backup server)
-for backups of vm's and security cameras, soon to be off site at my cousins house.

 

[habbajabba]

Kodi for droid just hit the f-droid repo. I would like to see how MCM with kodi works. Plex I'm not sure as unwilling to pay them to watch my own content. Zfs is the best for data storage tbs. Funny how you had to create vm's for each user just to share content. Pictures would be cool too.

 

[cw823]

Kodi for droid just hit the f-droid repo. I would like to see how MCM with kodi works. Plex I'm not sure as unwilling to pay them to watch my own content. Zfs is the best for data storage tbs. Funny how you had to create vm's for each user just to share content. Pictures would be cool too.

I think the only thing you HAVE to pay for for plex is for apple devices. We use Plex on roku and you don't need the plex pass.

I can probably get some pictures as well.

 

[habbajabba]

Thanks. I have tons of content and after seeing what you use I just have to try mcm. I've used everything else to try and organize my videos and nothing worked right so far. And yeah pics of such an awesome array of hardware would be kinda cool too.

 

[cw823]

Thanks. I have tons of content and after seeing what you use I just have to try mcm. I've used everything else to try and organize my videos and nothing worked right so far. And yeah pics of such an awesome array of hardware would be kinda cool too.

I would be entirely lost without MCM, to be honest. It's come so far, and it's made 90% of my collection entirely hands-off as far as maintenance and keeping things current.

I'm still struggling with organization in Plex, only because of the quantity of my content. after watching how my friends access Plex, more than half of the time they're just searching the main screen for whatever media they would like to watch, so it really doesn't matter how I've divided it all up. If you want to take a closer look, my Plex nickname is pretty easy to figure out based on my username here, lol.

 

[habbajabba]

I ran MCM and got a portion of content plugged in. It changed my folder structure but that's understandable considering the external files it creates for each title. I like it a lot so far but have to spend more time with it to get to figure it out. I connects perfect and just plain works so far which is more than I can say for most all the stuff I've tried previous. I had one that was working darn good but it kept dropping the imdb api updates and it never got updated itself so I had to delete it.
I tried installing Kodi 18.1 but it said I need Platform Update for windows kB2670838 which refuses to install. May have something to do with WMP who knows. Everything's on my desktop so it doesn't matter. Thanks for the mcm tip bruddah.