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My home lab setup with UNRAID, Jan 2022 edition

// Written by Arjun Komath

// Tue, Jan 18 2022

I’m going to walk you through my home lab setup, showing you what I’ve set up now, both hardware and software and also share my plans for potential upgrades in the future.

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Hardware

We will begin with the hardware, I have a basic home lab setup with just two servers, one is a used Dell Optiplex 7050 Micro used as a web server, the other is a custom build tower PC that acts as my gaming PC, NAS and is also hosting several services. They’re connected using a TP-Link AX6000 Wifi 6 router with a gigabit internet connection.

Specifications for Dell Optiplex 7050 aka Hades
Core™ i5-6600, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD

My home lab setup with UNRAID, Jan 2022 edition

Specifications for Tower PC aka Thor
Core™ i5-11600K, ROG STRIX B560-G Motherboard, 32GB RAM, 4TB storage (2x 1TB NVMe drive, 1x 2TB HDD), Nvidia RTX 3060 and the most important part RGB (for extra FPS)

My home lab setup with UNRAID, Jan 2022 edition

Software

Starting with Dell, it has a super simple setup with just Ubuntu and docker. Essentially, it is a docker swarm worker node that connects to a swarm leader hosted in DigitalOcean and its only purpose is to run production workloads assigned by the leader. It also runs my homebridge docker container, I’m too lazy to move it to my UNRAID server. You might be wondering why docker swarm? why not Kubernetes or Nomad? I chose docker swarm because it takes barely 2 mins to set everything up and I didn’t want to go through the elaborate set-up process which is required for most container orchestration managers.

Coming to the tower PC, it runs on UNRAID OS, which is unbelievably easy to set-up and has an amazing community. I don’t want to go too deep into UNRAID now, maybe another time, but for now here are the things I’ve running on it:

My home lab setup with UNRAID, Jan 2022 edition

UNRAID Array

My home lab setup with UNRAID, Jan 2022 edition

VMs and Docker containers

And lots of docker containers:

What’s next?

These are my highly optimistic plans, kind of like my dream setup.

🚨 Mar 2022 Update