I’ve recently been infected with the home lab sickness

Caught the home lab bug, here's what I ended up putting together. This is still a work in progress and not finished by any means. Also open to suggestion as I'm relatively new to this.

Opnsense router installed into a 2 nic optiplex not pictured. Hardware way overkill for what it needs though, just what I had on hand. 8th gen I7, 16gb ddr4 memory. Performing firewall, dhcp, dns, NAT functions. Static routes pointing back to vlans hosted on Cisco c3560 switch.

Cisco c3560cx 12 port non poe switch with 3d printed mounting brackets. 2x gigabit ports configured for each ESXi host using nic teaming for redundancy, uplink port to Synology nas and opnsense router, vlans and access lists configured for network segmentation. Switch unfortunately does not support NAT so had to offload that to opnsense router. Remaining open ports to be used by local workstations.

Cluster of 4x optiplex 3090 micros running ESXi 8.0 u3 managed by VCSA. 32gb memory (most likely to expand to 64 as needs change), i5 10600t processor, 2x1gb nic with m2 key nic installed in wlan port on motherboard. 3d printed brackets using petg filament.

Synology ds1525+ with 5x 12tb drives in raid5 ( technically its the proprietary Synology raid format, but it's basically a raid5 the way it's set up) NFS share mounted to each esxi host for shared storage across the hosts.

8 port pdu in the bottom u of the rack

Installed into a 12 u mojo wall mount rack with the back panel removed, same with front swinging glass door. Had to cut out a small section of the front facing rack with a Dremel to allow for the c3560cx switch to fit.

Use case for me right now is dedicated server hosting, email server hosting, docker, some small amounts of web hosting, going to try out Plex or jellyfin to see if that will work for a small number of concurrent users in a vm without transcoding. will more than likely move plex/jellyfin environment to its own dedicated host with a GPU for transcoding and running an llm like hermes. Need to figure out some sort of GPU QoS perhaps so llm doesn't step on plex transcoding. More things to come this is just where I'm starting.

I am absolutely open to ideas and projects. Part of the reason I started this is to teach myself new skills, which this project has done a lot already.