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· 2 min read

My homelab: a low-power mini rack

A Dell Wyse, an OptiPlex, two Proxmox hosts, big external drives and a Ubiquiti PoE switch, all in a mini rack.

My homelab is one of my favourite things I own. It’s not a wall of enterprise servers: it’s a mini rack of small, cheap, quiet machines that sip power and still run everything I need at home.

What’s in the rack

  • A Dell Wyse thin client. Thin clients are tiny, silent and use very little power, and they turn up second-hand for next to nothing.
  • A Dell OptiPlex. A small office PC with more room for RAM and storage, so it takes the heavier jobs.
  • Two Proxmox hosts. Each machine runs Proxmox, so everything lives in VMs and containers that I can back up, move or rebuild without touching the hardware.
  • Large external drives for media and backups.
  • A Ubiquiti 8-port PoE switch tying it all together, and powering devices over the network cable.

What runs on it

Plex is the headline act, serving films and TV to every screen in the house. Around it sit the other services I run, each with its own admin page, which is exactly why I built Tyllo, my dashboard for reaching them all.

Why low cost, low power

A homelab is on all day, every day, so the electricity bill matters more than the purchase price. Small used business PCs are the sweet spot:

  • Cheap to buy. Ex-office thin clients and small form factor PCs flood the second-hand market.
  • Cheap to run. They idle at a fraction of what a tower server draws.
  • Quiet and cool. They can live in a living space instead of a cupboard.
  • Good enough. Plex and a handful of containers don’t need a datacentre.

What I’ve learned

  • Proxmox makes small hardware flexible. Containers are light enough that even a thin client can run several services.
  • Storage is the bit to plan. Compute is easy to add, but media and backups grow forever.
  • Keep it tidy. A mini rack and a decent switch make the whole thing easier to look after, and nicer to look at.

Photos coming soon.

Further reading