For years I have been running a “homelab” of various computers that serve up fileshares, containers, and random projects that I liked to tinker with. I was really just using old hardware from previous personal desktops that I re-purposed. Deciding to up my game a bit, I wanted to re-implement all my projects on an actual server and virtualize everything. This would give more room for growth, more flexibility, and better reliability (I hope).
Updated pic – the rails came in and its tucked in the closet nicely 🙂
Hardware
I purchased a used Dell Precision R730 for around $200 on eBay. That particular machine included:
- Dual Xeon E5-2670 CPUs
- 32GB of RAM (gonna need more eventually)
- Dual 750w power supplies
To this I added:
- 1x 500GB SAAS Drive
- 4x 1TB SATA SSDs
I bought these aftermarket drive caddies from Amazon: Amazon.com: WORKDONE 4-Pack – 2.5″ Hard Drive Caddy G176J Compatible for Dell PowerEdge Server
I ordered a cheap 12u rack also from Amazon: Amazon.com: VEVOR 12U Open Frame Server Rack
And I found some used sliding rails for this model on eBay for about $40 – Dell part number: FYK4G
Software
Proxmox is a virtualization platform that is often well regarded in the homelab community especially. My plan is to run Proxmox on the bare metal and then create containers and VMs within for various purposes. Proxmox – Powerful open-source server solutions
My experience getting Proxmox running was really smooth. There was not much to note that isn’t covered in regular guides or documentation, but consider if you are going to use ZFS filesystem pools, because most of these machines will include a RAID card. I learned that you cannot run ZFS on drives that are already in a RAID pool. I had to go into the Dell BIOS and change the RAID card mode to HBA mode a.k.a “IT Mode”. I was able to find the HBA mode in the raid settings of the BIOS.
I planned to also use it as a fileshare for other services, so 3 of my SSDs were configured in a ZFS pool as ZRAID1. I’ll go into more detail on getting this configured and Samba installed so that my windows machines can reach the file share in a later article.
At this point, I have Proxmox running with the ZFS fileshare configured and working.
Future Plans
These are my current plans for what I am going to do with this setup in the near term, which I will hopefully write up here:
- Get the server installed in the rack (waiting for the rails)
- Create a linux vm to serve as a host for docker containers
- Get pi-hole running in a container to block ads
- Get Jellyfin running in a container to serve media to my home devices (also using the file share)
- Install a spare Nvidia RTX 2060 Super in this server for hardware video encoding (jellyfin).
Dylan Projects 