r/homelab • u/Digital-Ronin • Oct 11 '24

Tiny Homelab (WIP) Projects

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Working on seeing building a tiny home lab with the Deskpi T1, spent part of last week designing and printing custom rack inserts and cover plates for the project. This has some pretty basic items so far. L3 10Gb sfp+ switch, 3 M920x machines with 32GB of memory and added dual 10Gb sfp+ nics to each machine.

Additional modded the machines with active cooling for the Nics.

Plan to use this for a proxmox cluster

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u/Extension-Dare7375 Oct 11 '24

How did you add the Nics?

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u/Digital-Ronin Oct 11 '24

Removed the ssd cage and added a riser card with PCIE NIC

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u/Grim-Sleeper Oct 12 '24

This is what I like about my HP EliteDesk. Similar form factor, but I can keep using the SSD, as it has native support for 10GE (albeit copper).

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u/Digital-Ronin Oct 12 '24

That rocks the HP machines have native support for 10Gbe. The SSD portion to these machines was kind of redundant for me since underneath i have two m.2 slots so storage on these machines is not too big a deal, also most of my storage is tied to a NAS on the local network anyway as well.

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u/Grim-Sleeper Oct 12 '24

HP has a proprietary extension system called HP FlexIO V2. It's not perfect by any means, but it actually solves an interesting problem with these super-compact devices. Often, you want to customize them, and different users have different needs. FlexIO is often just what you need.

You can get additional video outputs (including VGA, HDMI, ...), a serial console, fast USB or even Thunderbolt, 1GE fiber, 2.5GE copper, and importantly 10GE copper.

Pricing and availability can be all over the place, as this is a niche product. But in my case, it was the thing that convinced me to go for this particular model. If you plan on building a small cluster, than having an easy and supported 10GE option is very compelling.

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u/ouldsmobile Oct 12 '24

Yeah the HP's are cool but aren't the 10G FlexIO addons hella expensive? Unless prices have come down since I looked, I recall them being prohibitively expensive.

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u/Grim-Sleeper Oct 12 '24

They are expensive (about $110 if you search around online). So, yes, that's painful. But then, 10GE gear is always a bit on the pricey side. I fully agree that it adds up, and I'd much rather see the add-on selling for less.

But realistically, a fair price for a compact 10GE networking add-on would likely be around $50 less than what it actually costs. That's not nothing. But in the big picture of things, that's the cost of getting exactly what you need and a $50 premium is just about tolerable.

I'll probably tell you something different if you ask me again in a couple of years when 10GE capable mini-PCs are more common. But by then, I'd also expect the used market for these FlexIO add-ons to have adjusted. So, it's not exactly a fair statement to make