Home Lab Servers πŸ“‘ r/homelab by r/homelab Β· Thu, Apr 2, 2026

I'm not a religious man, but saints do exist! (CL seller gifted me a top of the line server circa ~2016)

tl;dr What would you do with it? 2x Xeon E5-2699A v4 (88 threads) and 16x32GB 2Rx4 ECC DDR4-2400 (512GB total) on a X10DAi mobo 16x 800GB SAS3 SSDs (~12TB) over an Areca ARC1883ix-16 HW RAID controller (even has the battery backup!) 2x 256GB SATA SSDs for boot 2x NICs (Myricom 10G-PCIE2-8C2-2S) populated with 2/ea Cisco SFP-10G-T-X modules (4x10G SFP+ total) Dual Edge Coral TPU w/ PCIe adapter I wanted to mark this as Lab Porn because it brings me so much joy, but I doubt it qualifies. A saint from CL gifted this to me when I inquired about purchasing it and some networking gear. I already have a TrueNAS media server running the services in the last picture, and a HA Yellow for home automation. Since those services are effectively my production environment for the family (3 users, each of which like to act as my boss πŸ˜‚) , I don't get to experiment with them much at all. So I'm interested in using this to learn new things and offload CPU based workloads (like re-encoding my media library to AV1 or HEVC, immich tasks, etc). So far, I've installed Proxmox (first time!) and started adding some LXCs and VMs to learn how that process goes. It's been quite the learning curve... so many issues with particular VM configuration settings, user management, ACLs, mounting network shares... lots and lots to learn! With all that you lot know, what would you do with it? I should preface this part by stating that every 10 W/yr is ~$40/yr where I live, so I take some unusual measures to save power. Since it idles around 10x the power consumption of my media server (~230W) I leave it off when not in use. It doesn't have IPMI so I added a IP-KVM for remote management. Even when off it was drawing ~10W, so I also put a smart switch on the circuit which operates well under 1W. It's also using an old HW RAID controller that consumes ~40W* and I had concerns about stability when using it as passthrough for SW RAID (ZFS), so I've ordered a 9305-16i HBA to shave ~30W* off. I'll p

πŸ’¬ 0 Crumbs ⭐ 0 saves

πŸ’¬ 0 Crumbs

Sign in and join the Nook to post a Crumb.

No Crumbs yet. Be the first!