My Homelab Two Years Later, Every Upgrade and What It Cost
2 days ago
- Upgraded from a $200 ThinkServer with 15 containers to a rack with two Dell R730s (80 cores, 256GB RAM), two NVIDIA GPUs, 10G networking, VLANs, and 73 containers managed in OpenTofu.
- Hardware cost ~$7,400; rack averages 430W (~$47/month at $0.15/kWh). Break-even estimated at 4.6 years but heavily dependent on an $80/month security monitoring savings – without it, break‑even exceeds 11 years.
- Lessons learned: 10G links peak at just 12% of one link; night mode automation saves only ~5W (15 cents/month); CPUs average 13% busy; priority should be infrastructure-as-code from day one and measuring before automating.
- Adopted VLANs for isolation (IoT, cameras, guest, main LAN), migrated Home Assistant into a Proxmox VM, and built a monitoring stack with Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, and Alertmanager backed by 185 health checks.
- All containers defined in OpenTofu using shared modules; drift checks run every six hours; backups via Proxmox Backup Server locally and Backblaze B2 offsite (~$9/month for 1.3TB).
- Key regrets: retrofitting VLANs, not putting hosts under IaC (CPU governor drifted), and buying 10G before speeding up NAS connectivity (still on 1G).
- Planned next steps: lower‑power hardware for non‑GPU services, rebuild or retire night mode, add sensor‑stagnation checks, and create a secondary iDRAC access path independent of prxbox1.