I just spent a good chunk of today migrating some services onto new docker containers in Proxmox LXCs.
As I was updating my network diagram, I was struck by just how many services, hosts, and LXCs I’m running, so counted everything up.
- 116 docker containers
- Running on 25 docker hosts
- 50 are the same on each docker host - Watchtower and Portainer agent
- 38 Proxmox LXCs (19 are docker hosts)
- 8 physical servers
- 7 VLANs
- 5 SSIDs
- 2 NASes
So, it got me wondering about the size of other people’s homelabs. What are your stats?
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Currently 3 physical boxes down from 4 and aiming for 2. It pretty well comes down to a hypervisor and a NAS and the regular aux gear like a switch and modem. They’re big boxes though with about 35 TB storage, .5 TB RAM, and 72 cores between them so lots of space to make imaginary computers in.
Right now my goal is reducing the power footprint. Kill-a-watt places the whole set at 650 watts today and I should knock about 150 off when I get the other box virtualized.
Nice - have you got anything setup to monitor power consumption? I’ve got a few of those “smart” plugs running on Tuya (localised through Home Assistant) but I’m not 100% convinced of their accuracy just yet…
Just the kill-a-watt plug that the main power block is attached to. The servers have stats visible via the IDRAC (R730XD & R820) to break out for those, but nothing that shows a dashboard or such.
I’ve found the HP iLOs to be really unreliable for viewing across the network. Something I’ve been meaning to look into…
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters AP WiFi Access Point DNS Domain Name Service/System ESXi VMWare virtual machine hypervisor Git Popular version control system, primarily for code HTTP Hypertext Transfer Protocol, the Web LVM (Linux) Logical Volume Manager for filesystem mapping LXC Linux Containers MQTT Message Queue Telemetry Transport point-to-point networking NAS Network-Attached Storage NUC Next Unit of Computing brand of Intel small computers PSU Power Supply Unit PiHole Network-wide ad-blocker (DNS sinkhole) Plex Brand of media server package PoE Power over Ethernet RAID Redundant Array of Independent Disks for mass storage SSO Single Sign-On Unifi Ubiquiti WiFi hardware brand VPN Virtual Private Network VPS Virtual Private Server (opposed to shared hosting) ZFS Solaris/Linux filesystem focusing on data integrity nginx Popular HTTP server
20 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 3 acronyms.
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I have a very modest 7 docker containers on a vm on my gaming rig and I have a raspberry pi for my DNS server. Honestly my setup is quite scuffed (in comparison to yours), but it does what I need it to do
Mine’s not as fancy as it sounds - a couple second hand enterprise boxes and a handful of Raspberry Pis, mostly.
I don’t have a homelab ( space contrains ) but I do have 2 vps that I use to host in total 13 docker containers, mail server and an xmpp server.
Edit: My lemmy server is also hosted on them.
What I’m more interesting in is what is it that you selfhost to have so many docker containers?
What I’m more interesting in is what is it that you selfhost to have so many docker containers?
Well, lots of services are stacks of containers - Immich has 6 containers and Piped has 5, for example - so it’s easy for the container count to get up there.
Other “services” are groups of containers/hosts to provide a complete capability - Home Assistant; esphome; Node-RED, for example. Then there’s just the stuff that, due to my desire for loose coupling, are spread across multiple docker hosts/containers - 5 x Sonarr/Radarr instances, for example.
How do people get to so many Docker containers before moving to Kubernetes? I only have 76 containers across 68 pods and that’s far too much for me to manage in Docker.
Not really doing much docker, but a lot of LXC - everything scripted with ansible. I define basic container metadata in a yaml parsed by a custom inventory plugin - and that is sufficient for deploying a container before doing provisioning in it.
Honestly, anything not mission critical (network/internet and home automation, mainly) gets auto-updated by Watchtower. I have Watchtower set to pull latest images of everything on a weekly basis, and specific containers that are set to monitor only. Every Saturday morning, I check the Slack channel for notifications of containers that need controlled updating.
How many W are you pulling, on the average? Or kWh per year.
For reference: Using dual E5-2630L, DL360/380G8 uses around 130-150 watts average unless something is spiking.
With a couple Cisco routers, 4 HP server, adds about 150 dollars to my monthly bill. This wouldn’t be possible in Europe.
My current supplier rate is about 0.6 EUR/kWh. I make some 1/2 to 2/3 of my power myself, for a price that’s less than half of that.
make some 1/2 to 2/3 of my power myself I’d have to :) That’s .66c US per. Mine is .11-12 US / .10 EUR. Mine is 6 times cheaper. `Merica
Insert rant about our power is probably a large percentage of coal and gas (cheap + super bad)
Good question. According to my UPS, I’m pulling about 173Wh for everything except my pair of HP DL360s. Those each have a couple of 480W PSUs in them, but they’re nowhere near running at full tilt, so I can’t be sure. I really should get some power measurement going…
You’re probably drawing about 400-450 W.
Yeah, seems about right. I’m planning on buying a 32RU rack in the new year - will fit it out with power monitoring PDUs while I’m at it.
- 3 DL360G8 Esxi (86Ghz/512GB RAM)
- 1 DL380G8 TrueNAS
- 1 DL360G7 Veeam
- Dell n5070 Extended PVE SophosnUTM
- 48 Port Catalyst rack switch
- Cisco 2921
- Fibre Channel / iSCSI
50+ VMs and containers:
- VMware ESXi, vCenter, VMware Log Insight, VMware OPS
- DMVPN to remote locations like a desk switch at work and family member houses
- Sophos UTM
- Active Directory for my home computers
- hybrid sync to MS Entra (Azure Active Directory) with Entra Connect
- hybrid Exchange on Premise and Exchange online
- Active Directory for management network
- Security Onion VMs for IDS
- Network monitoring like Elastiflow, PRTG
- Docker, gitlab, OpenSalt / Saltstack
- Trellix ePO for AV
- Nessus vuln scanners
- Team Awareness Kit (TAK) server
- Active Directory Certificate Services
- Home media applications
These things are mostly to maintain familiarity and documentation development. I write off the cost of electricity as continuing education and professional development. More enterprise than some enterprises.
Love it! I’m gonna grab a 32RU rack soon. Got most of my stuff in a small ~14RU wall cabinet right now. I was originally aiming for low power everything - RasPis, etc. But I’ve since bought a couple DL360s, and you just can’t beat the sheer grunt factor, especially when paired with Proxmox.
86Ghz
Woah
Most likely some sum of (cores x Ghz) each processor in all servers? While it kind of makes sense, it feels like a much higher clock speed than what I’m used to seeing.
I have a single quad sock E5-4640 server, I think in terms of me having 4 processors with 8 cores at base 2.4Ghz each; I don’t regularly (or ever, for that matter) think in terms of me having 76.8Ghz.
360G8s should be single or dual sock E5 v2 processors. I can’t really math right now (insufficient caffeine), but I can’t seem to make the math work, so I’d imagine something that to be an aggregated across all three systems, not individual systems?
Yes, aggregate of all three hosts in cluster, sorry. Dual socket, six cores.
- 116 docker containers
- Running on 25 docker hosts
- 50 are the same on each docker host - Watchtower and Portainer agent
- 38 Proxmox LXCs (19 are docker hosts)
- 8 physical servers
- 7 VLANs
- 5 SSIDs
- 2 NASes
And a partridge in a pear treeeee.
Lol - Merry Christmas, my anonymous friend. 🎅
I’ve pared mine down a lot. The biggest hurdle for me has been storage.
It used to be 5 2u servers running a ceph cluster, but that got to be expensive and unruly.
Now it’s mainly a small half depth supermicro for my firewall, a half depth supermicro for home assistant, a 2u Dell for unraid, and a small NAS.
Unraid houses Plex and the *arrs. Along with a handful of other useful services like immich.
I do colo a 1u HP though that houses my pbx, web server, unifi controller, jirai server, nextcloud, email, and a bunch of other servers that I run.
Now, I’ve got a lot of spare hardware though. 7 Dell 1u servers, 2 Dell 2u, a supermicro 3u, an HP 2u and a bunch of things clients that I might turn into replacements for my rokus.
I’ve got one headless cheap desktop PC sitting under my desk.
I have a NAS and it runs deluge to download torrents, and hosts two very basic websites.
Old laptop, Debian with docker running nextcloud, navidrome, jellyfin, gitea, librespeed, wireguard, dnsmasq, and nginx as a reverse proxy.
You’ve got like a whole DCs worth of stuff. I’ve downscaled the hardware in my server a lot, but it’s still just a single Threadripper 2970wx with 128 GB RAM and 50 TB of ZFS storage and 50 TB of cloud based object storage in a midtower case. I have like 20 containers running, one is a Caddy webserver which acts as a reverse proxy for all the others.
I love to do things to excess as much as the next geek, but I could never find a reason to run as much as you have.
Honestly, it’s because I like to play. I don’t need PEAP auth for my wireless network, but I run a radius server providing MAC and user auth, anyway.
I hear ya, the answer to “why?” is usually “because I can” 😂
About 8 months ago I had 20x HDDs and 8x NVME drives in my server, totaling 187 TB across three ZFS pools. I could write to the largest pool (2 RAIDZ1 striped vdevs, 6 drives wide) at 250 MB/sec and read from it at over a GB/sec and that was from spinning rust with NVME “special devices”.
What was I doing with all of this? Pirating movies and TV shows and running a media server for my friends and family.
Wow I am not in your league
I am currently migrating from a dedicated docker host to a proxmox host with multiple LXC containers.
old host - 23 docker containers, 128GB system drive, 4TB data drive
backup server - 1 docker container, 1TB disk
proxmox - 3 LXC containers, one of which has 3 docker containers. 500GB system drive, 4TB media drive (not LVM)
The plan is to migrate the loads on the old host to the proxmox host. I also have another 4TB drive coming with the intent of setting up a RAID with 2 of the 4TB drives.
A single SFF desktop setup in a Node306. 2700x, 32 GB RAM, Arc A380, some WD reds.
- Homeassistant & associated packages for esphome and Zwave stuff
- Jellyfin
- *arr suite + transmission
- yacht
- uptimekuma
- paperless
- immich
- authelia with OIDC SSO for containers where possible
- traefik for reverse proxy
- Nexcloud
- valheim server
- boinc in the winter
- syncthing for phone sync
- more services for keeping up the others
Soon a pihole to come.
I want to expand my smart home setup. My project this spring is integrating my smart gas and electric meters into homeassistant. We are completely stripping the house so I am wiring up everything with KNX with a nee Zwave devices where needed. Greatly expanding the smartish home.
I also have to set up a proper network. Right now I am using my Proximus Internet Box from the ISP which admittedly is pretty customizable.
Love this! Lot of similarity to what I use - Authelia’s awesome, especially paired with a free push 2FA like Duo.
- *art suite + transmission
*arr suite?
boinc in the winter
Lol. I really doubt an extra Watt or two during winter helps, and probably not saving much than just running it the whole year.
Good post though
No, I (respectfully) disagree… When I had a tower PC under my desk, I upped Boinc to use ~50% idle CPU (from memory… might’ve been more) and that would just keep the chill off my office so that I didn’t need to heat it (unless it was really cold).
In the Summer I would drop Boinc down to ~25% as it was getting too hot in there.
Well, considering going from a 40W idle system to 80 to 100W is a >100% increase in power.
In Belgium we pay 0.30€ per kWh, so running the entire year at 80W average is approximately 150€ difference with idle the entire year. That definitely helps. That is 1/3 the cost of a lawnmower or a month of groceries.
But in the winter it is a 80-100W small heater that can keep a local area a degree or so warmer.
When you start paying your own power bill it really adds up. I wish I had gone for an intel NUC sometimes.
I see your electric is about 2.2x the cost of mine, so yes that’s significant. Was mostly pointing at your net impact to heating in winter, which in your case is only an additional 40-60W from baseline. That’s effectively an extra Type A light bulb in your room. This is more of a savings during hot months than effectively heating during cold months.
It really depends on the size of the space. It does a lot more in a room of 8m^2 than 20m^2. There is a reason that a 40W incandescent bulb is used to ferment foods like yogurt in an oven. It produces enough heat to keep the whole oven at fermenting temps.
