Upgrades to the Home Lab

I’ve had the opportunity over the past few weeks to update and revise the deployment of my home lab and work with a few different technologies, with the intention of providing a better underlying platform to test and play with new technologies as we take them to market. Below are a few of the new or updates services I’ve deployed:

The “Core” Software

There’s an underlying set of software that needs to be deployed to help enable the entirety of the homelab, and in my opinion that relates to DNS, virtualisation and management of virtualisation hardware, and DHCP.

DNS

For DNS, I decided to utilise BIND, mostly as an opportunity to try out and build comfort with Linux-based environments. I used the tutorial provided by Adam the Automator as a baseline, adapting it to my own environment, and after a bit of back-and-forward troubleshooting managed to get it up and running successfully, allowing me to finally start using actual URL’s instead of IP addresses to access different parts of the environment.

Virtualisation

Pretty easy choice for me here, having worked with VMware regularly in the past, as well as having access to licenses through being a VMware partner, as well as my VMUG membership. The two Intel NUC’s that constitute my homelab were updated to vSphere 8 and vCenter over the top to manage them. Both devices are connected to my Synology NAS via iSCSI, allowing me to take advantage of features such as vMotion and DRS when deploying new VM’s or going through host upgrades.

DHCP

Most of the hosts I have in my environment are statically addressed, so there is less of a need for me to have DHCP. But I do have it running, using a Uniti Router’s inbuild DHCP capability for any temporary hosts to get up and running if needed.

Building On the Core

Once the core services were up and running, the next thing I wanted to do was make sure that I was able to keep my DNS records up to date and rollback if something went wrong. The easiest way to do this I decided, was to have my various DNS configuration files managed in a Git repository, and a system to deploy any updates as things changed. For this, I decided to again build on this as a learning experience and use Ansible modules to keep BIND updated. For this, I took some heavy influence from YetiOps post on updating their own homelab and made a similar Ansible role to keep my own environment consistent.

Continued Development and Deployment

Next up I’ll put some more information down on the set up of the Windows sub-domain in the environment, provisioning of Veeam and connecting it to Cloud Connect, and what the next steps are in continuing to develop the homelab and keep learning.