I started my homelab journey nearly 5 years ago with a single HP MicroServer N40L. The addiction quickly grew and I then moved on to an R710 but it was a little too power hungry for my needs so I ended up purchasing a few used Dell R330s and moved on to virtualization via VMware. I am now running a total of 4 servers with the following specs:
Servers
Dell R230 – TrueNAS Backup (replication)
- Intel Xeon E3-1240 v6 3.7GHz
- Intel X550-T1 10Gb Network Adapter
- PERC H330 RAID Controller
- 16GB DDR4 ECC
Dell Poweredge R330 – ESXi 7.0 (Host 1)
- Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5 3.4GHz
- DELL Broadcom 57810S 10GB Dual Port
- PERC H330 RAID Controller
- x2 1TB Evo SSD (Datastore – RAID-0)
- 120Gb SSD Boot Drive
- 64GB DDR4 ECC
Dell Poweredge R330 – ESXi 7.0 (Host 2)
- Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5 3.4GHz
- DELL Broadcom 57810S 10GB Dual Port
- PERC H330 RAID Controller
- x2 1TB Evo SSD (Datastore – RAID-0)
- 120Gb SSD Boot Drive
- 48GB DDR4 ECC
Dell Poweredge T420 – TrueNAS (Main)
- (Dual) Intel Xeon E5-2420 1.90GHz
- DELL Broadcom 57810S 10GB Dual Port PCI-E SFP+ Network Card
- PERC H710 Adapter RAID Controller
- 48GB DDR3 ECC
- 120Gb SSD Boot Drive
- x8 4TB WD RED (4 mirror vdevs)
Network
- 24 Port Cable Matters patch panel
- Unifi 48-500W POE switch
- Unifi Aggregation 8 Port 10Gb Switch
- Ubiquiti Edgerouter 4
The configuration above follows the 3-2-1 backup rule where both ESXi hosts have dedicated storage (1) and are backed up via Veeam B&R (2) to the main NAS and later sent off to B2 via cloud task (3).