The unofficial homelab HCL
Networking Equipment
Section titled “Networking Equipment”See also :Category:Networking
MikroTik
Section titled “MikroTik”Switches
Section titled “Switches”CRS125-24G-1S-IN
Section titled “CRS125-24G-1S-IN”This Mikrotik Cloud Router Switch provides tons of features, and can be purchased at a decent price. Cheaper models with less ports do exist. The CRS can be provide advanced services such as DHCP, Certificate Authority Server, and DNS Server. This switch supports an MTU size of 4064.
Routers
Section titled “Routers”OpenWRT
Section titled “OpenWRT”Anything on the OpenWRT (or it’s imminent successor LEDE) will enable you to support some useful and fancy features with a good level of reliability and feature parity between models, making for a nice familiar setup routine and enabling you to do some nice tricks like routing between VLANs on home equipment.
Ubiquiti
Section titled “Ubiquiti”Switches
Section titled “Switches”Cisco SFP-H10GB-CU3M
FusionIO
Section titled “FusionIO”This card is on the HCL, and since it’s older it can be found for cheap, but it’s an enterprise drive!
lspci -v
0000:02:00.0 Mass storage controller Mass storage controller: SanDisk ioMemory [fioiom0]
vmkchdev -l |grep 0000:02:00.0
0000:02:00.0 1aed:2001 1aed:2001 vmkernel fioiom0
Desktop Hardware
Section titled “Desktop Hardware”Standard business/consumer desktops are often workable as low cost hypervisor hosts. They are usually available for a sensible price second hand on ebay and local sale sites, or possibly from an employer who is having a hardware refresh and is happy to loan a budding homelabber some old hardware. Desktop hardware would not usually be found in, for example, VMware’s official HCL but will often still work in a vendor-unsupported configuration. The models below have been successfully used by the community.
| Manufacturer | Model | Hypervisor | Configuration Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dell | OptiPlex 790 USFF | vSphere ESXi 6.0U2 | A practial ultra-small form factor where space is an issue, but additional PCI cards are not required. Implemented with 16GB (2x8GB) DIMM. |
| Intel | NUC | vSphere | See Main Page for full list of models |
| Example | Example | Example | Example |