My current home lab is ancient and low end, really low end. I created it when my internet connection was only 2 Mb/s down and as little as 128 kb up, so my OpenBSD Geode based firewall running with only 10Mb/s ports was quite reasonable. The rest of my lab over the years consisted of a few old laptops, an 8GB RAM QNAP NAS with some docker conatinewrs on it and a few RaspBerry Pi systems. Right now I have a 200Mb/s fibre connection to the internet and my network is mixed 10M/100M/1G.

Next to the always-on part of my lab, I have my development mini-PC and a (power hungry) workstation with 4 outdated GPU cards in it that I still ocasionaly use for data engineering work.

I'm short on funds, but next month I'll get a little bit of money that should allow me to start building a new home lab. In the short run, this lab should help me work on different aspects of my three main open source projects, because to do that, for one I will want to run my own HIVE node for some important experiments, and my current hardware comes nowhere close to the specs for that.

In the long run, maybe by the end of next year if finances allow me to, I would like to have a complete and redundant home-lab setup where I could run some interesting Web 3.0 stuf on, and that will keep being current when faster fiber optic options become available to me. I'm at 200Mb/s right now, but 4Gb/s is slowly bencomming available in many places now at not that much higher cost (only €17.50 a month extra), so I want a redundant setup that will already be compatible with such speeds.

For now though, I think I'm going to get just a single system, a single node in what I hope will become a 3 system cluster over the next year or two at most if/when finances allow me to.

Getting a first Minisforum MS-01

This is the node hardware I'm looking at, the Minisforum MS-01. It comes as a barebone in two main variants. A Core i5 variant at €450, and an i9 variant at €730. That is a difference of €280, and because I eventually want to get three of these, that would add up to a difference of €840 what is quite a low of money that I feel I am better off spending on other components.

The device has some great networking options. Two 10Gb/s SFP+ ports, two 2.5 Gb/s ethernet ports, and two USB4 ports that support 20Gb/s thunderbold networking. The device also has space for a low profile graphics card, but it will need to be single slow because there isn't anymore space.

So what's next? RAM. The unit supports up to 96 GB of RAM, and there is non sense on skimping on that, so for about €280 extra, we can put these modules in there, bringing us to €730 so far.

Thirdly we are going to need storage. The unis supports up to 3 M.2 SSD sticks. I could get 3 sticks and maybe eventualy I will, if it turns out that I need the storage, but I have reasons I want to get only two for now. Because I am planning on a 3 node redundant cluster eventualy, and because I plan to first only run experiments for development on it and maybe a testnet node, so I should be able to choose my RAID setup for a single node.

So I want to get two of these sticks for now. Two 4TB sticks of €230 each, bringing the total so far up to €1190 so far. I'll put these two sticks into a RAID0 configuration giving me extra speed. For now I don't need the extra 4T that a third stick would bring even if it should make things even faster, but most of all because I am starting off with only one node, raid 0 0ver 3 sticks may be pushing my luck a bit too much for comfort, even while its just a lab setup.

Now for the final piece to complete this node. Next to RAM and storage, I plan to run some transcoding on the nodes, and apart from that parts of the upcomming C++ version of my CoinZdense project, including the part that might eventualy make its way into the HIVE core code if I'm succesfull, may very well benefit from some Sycl GPU code. And even if it doesn't, I've been wanting to learn Sycl for a long time and havent had an oportunity yet. I have some CUDA C++ experience, but Sycl will be completely new for me, but I am anctious to learn.

So I want to get myself a relatively cheap GPU that fits in this node, and this one seems to be just perfect.

A low profile single slot AMD Radeon RX 6400 priced at €130, bringing the total cost of the node to €1320

is this a good setup?

So what do you think? Is this a good setup? Good enough to run a HIVE node on plus some other things? For experiments and development for now, but in the future when I have some redundancy, hopefully for real and permanently. Is it responsible to already go RAID0 enen while I'm still single node for at least 6 months? Am I justified in going for the cheaper i5, or should I entend myself financialy and try to go for the i9 option? I don't have much recent experience with setting up a home lab, so all input is appreciated.

My vision towards the future.

Eventualy, over time, I hope to buy two more identical nodes. The USB4 ports apear perfect to create a 20Gb/s ring network setup. When I have all three nodes I will probably want to add a third SSD stick to the RAID0 setups, and I will want to buy a decent dedicated switch.

My eye is currently on this one. A €600 switch from MicroTik with four 10Gb/s SFP+ ports and eight ethernet 10G/5G/2.5G/1G ports. That should give me a 10Gb/s link to each of the 3 nodes plus a suitable port, either SFP+ or 10G ethernet when I'm able to upgrade from 200Mb/s fiber to 1Gb/s or even 4Gb/s, and my whole network will be 10Gb/s capable.

That would leave me with one unused SFP+ port on the switch and one unused SFP+ port on each of the node. Not sure if it makes sense, but I could connect node B with node C an extra time , and connect and give node A a second 10Gb/s connection to the switch, maybe connect the 2.5G ports of node B and C to the switch too if I'm not using the ports in other ways. This may make things a bit more complicated in configuration though, so I'm not sure. The switch will also connect to my fiber connection, currently at 200Mb/s, but when it becomes available, at 4Gb/s.

No firewall ?

So what is missing from this image? Well, obvously a firewall. This is something I will need to figure out. I don't want to have to get a second switch and dedicate an entire extra node as firewall. The combined bandwith of the abouve image seems to good to just allow to be bootlenecked by a setup like that, plus the extra cost is just too much right now. The setup is going to be Linux, no OpenBSD, so I'll need to learn a lot about Linuc networking to find out what is possible.

Is this a good vision?

As I said, I don't have much recent experience with a homelab like this or with modern high speed networking and SSD sticks. Apart from that I've never tried running a HIVE node before, let alone a redundant one. Thus, any insights are apreciated. I'm planning to buy and configure my first ms-01 proxmox node in about one month. Is this setup a decent node for running HIVE related things on? Does the 3 node plus a switch setup make sense and can I run a distributed firewall/router on it too? Or shall I find a way to make a separate firewall?